Painters From France

"Courbet! and his influence was odious! the regret I feel and the rage, hate even, I feel for all that now would astonish you perhaps but this is the explanation. It's not poor Courbet whom I find loathsome, any more than his paintings work - As always I recognize the qualities they have - I am not complaining either about the influence of his painting on mine - there was none, and you will not find it in my canvases - There couldn't be; because I am too personal and I had many qualities that he did not have but which suited me well - But this is the reason why all that was so bad for me. That damned Realism made an immediate appeal to my vanity as a painter! and mocking all tradition cried out loud, with all the confidence of ignorance, 'Long live Nature!!' nature! My dear fellow, that cry was a great misfortune for me! - Where could you have found an apostle more ready to accept this theory, so appealing to him!. ..Ah my friend! our little band [artist-group around Courbet] was a depraved group! Oh! how I wish I had been a pupil of w:Ingres! .. .But I repeat I wish I had been his pupil! What a master he would have been - How soundly he would have guided us - drawing!"

"I don't need to plead for modern subjects here. This cause was won a long time ago. After those remarkable works by Edouard Manet and Courbet, no-one would now dare to say that the present day is unworthy of being painted.. .We find ourselves faced with the only reality: in spite of ourselves, we encourage our painters to portray us just as we are, with our styles of dress and our manners."

"Speak to me no more of the old masters. Not one of them can stand up to this sturdy fellow [=Courbet]."

"..a valiant fellow; he has a broad conception that one might adopt, but still it seems to me to be rather course in details.."

"At the moment, Madame, in the avenue Montaigne, just near the Painting Exhibition, one can see a sign with the words: REALISM. G. Courbet. Exhibition of forty paintings. It is an exhibition in the English style. A painter, whose name has become widely known since the February Revolution, has chosen his most significant paintings, and has had a studio built to exhibit them.. .It is an incredibly audacious act, it is the subversion of all institutions associated with the jury, it is a direct appeal to the public, some are saying it is freedom.. .It is a scandal, it is anarchy, it is art dragged through the mud. Others are saying these are fairground pictures.. ..Courbet was considered a troublemaker because he produced honest, life-size paintings of the bourgeoisie, peasants and village women. That was the first point. People could not admit that a stone breaker was worth as much as a prince: the nobility objected to him according so many meters of canvas to ordinary people; only sovereigns had the right to be painted full length, with their decorations, their rich clothes and their official expressions. What? A man from 'Ornans' [were Courbet was born], a peasant in his coffin, dares to draw a large crowd at his funeral: farmers, people of low estate.."

"Monsieur Courbet, too, [Baudelaire had previously been commenting on Ingres ] is a powerful worker, he has a wild and patient will; and the results he produces, results which for some have more charm than those of the great master of Raphaelesque tradition.. ..doubtlessly because they display a sectarian spirit, a butcher of faculties. Politics and literature, too, produce these vigorous temperaments, these protesters, these anti-Supernaturalists whose only justification is their sometimes salutary, reactive spirit. Providence, presiding over the interests of painting, gives them accomplices in all those who are tired or oppressed by the predominant, opposing idea. But the difference is that the heroic sacrifice that Monsieur Ingres makes for the honour of tradition and Raphaelesque beauty, Courbet accomplishes in the interests of external, positive, immediate nature. They have different motives when waging war on the imagination, and the two opposing obsessions lead them to the same immolation."

"[After leaving the w:Exposition Universelle (1855) ].. .I went to the Courbet exposition. He has reduced the price of admission to ten sous. I stayed there alone for nearly one hour and discovered a masterpiece in the picture, they rejected [the jury of the official Salon exhibition in Paris]. I simply could not tear myself away from the sight of it.. ..In [Courbet's painting 'The Studio'] the planes are well understood. There is atmosphere, and in some passages the execution is really remarkable, especially the tights and hips of the nude model and the breasts.. .The only fault is that the picture, as he painted it, seems to contain an ambiguity. It looks as though there were a real sky in the middle of the painting. They [The Salon-jury] have rejected one of the most remarkable works of our time, but Courbet is not the man to be discouraged by a little thing like that."

"The landscape [in his painting 'The Bathers', painted by Courbet in 1853] is of an extraordinary vigor, but Courbet has done no more than enlarge a study exhibited there, near his large canvas; the conclusion is that the figures [the two bathers in the painting] were put in afterwards and without connection with their surroundings. This brings up the question of harmony between the accessories and the principal object, a thing lacking in the majority of great painters."

"I went to see the paintings by Courbet. I was astonished by the vigour and the relief of his vast picture; but what a painting! What a subject! The commonness of the forms would not matter; it is the commonness and uselessness of the thought which are abominable.. ..Oh Rossini! Oh Mozart! Oh geniuses inspired by all the arts, who draw from things only the elements that are shown to the mind! What would you say before these pictures?"

"There have always been two schools of thought in painting: that of the Idealists and that of the Realists.. .Monsieur Courbet belongs to the second school, but he differs from it in that he seems to have taken an ideal opposite to the usual ideal: whereas the straightforward Realists are happy to copy nature as they see it, our young painter, parodying for his own benefit the verses of Nicolas Boileau Despréaux, seems to be saying: 'Only the ugly is beautiful, only the ugly is likeable.' It is not enough for the people to be common; he selects his subjects and then deliberately exaggerates their crudeness and vulgarity."

"'The Burial at Ornus' [wrongly cited in the catalogue of the Paris' Salon; it was: 'The Burial at Ornans'!] is a vulgar and blasphemous caricature, a signboard painting, which is full of hatred even for art; what a sad thing, in fact, when a true talent [Courbet!] tries to win the facile and extravagant applause of the nineteenth century through the exaggeration of ugliness."

"In as much as the Vendôme Column is a monument devoid of all artistic value, tending to perpetuate by its expression the ideas of war and conquest of the past imperial dynasty, which are reproved by a republican nation's sentiment, citizen Courbet expresses the wish that the National Defense government will authorize him to disassemble this column."

"Here I am, because of the People of Paris [ Paris Commune ], up to my neck in politics. President of the Federation of Artists, member of the Commune committee, city council delegate and delegate for Public Education: the four most important posts in Paris. I get up, I have breakfast, and I preside and sit on committees twelve hours a day. Now my head is starting to spin. But in spite of all this worry and trying to understand unfamiliar things, I am really happy.."

"They continue to be the rage. The salon where they are is jammed with people."

"I can only explain to some artists, who would be my collaborators and not my pupils, the method by which, in my opinion, one becomes a painter, by which I myself have tried to become one since my earliest days, leaving to each person the complete control of his individuality, the full liberty of his own expression in the application of this method. To achieve this aim, the organization of a communal studio, recalling those extremely fruitful collaborations of the studios of the Renaissance, could certainly be useful and contribute to the opening of the era of modern painting."

"Schools have no use except for discerning the analytic procedures of art. No school is capable of pressing on to a synthesis in isolation. Painting can not, without falling into abstraction, let a partial aspect of art dominate, whether it be drawing, color, composition, or any other one of the extraordinary multiplicity of means the totality of which alone constitutes this art."

"Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by the artist."

"The history of an era is finished with that era itself and with those of its representatives who have expressed it. It is not the task of modern times to add anything to the expression of former times to ennoble or embellish the past. What has been, has been. The human spirit must always begin work afresh in the present, starting off from acquired results. One must never start out from foregone conclusions proceeding from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion. The real artists are those who pick up their age exactly at the point to which it has been carried by preceding times."

"An epoch can only be reproduced by its own artists, I mean by the artists who lived in it. I hold the artists of one century basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century-in other words, of painting the past or the future."

"I cannot teach my art, nor the art of any school whatever, since I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, I maintain that art is completely individual, and is, for each artist, nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition."

"I, who believe that every artist should be his own teacher, cannot dream of setting myself up as a professor."

"I must explain to you what I recently had the occasion to tell the congress at Antwerp: I do not have, I cannot have, pupils."

"I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.'"

"I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one."

"The sea! The sea!.. ..in her growling fury, she reminds me of a of the caged monster who can devour me."

"I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect.. .The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of the laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears, and in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up."

"[An artist must apply] his personal faculties to the ideas and the events of the times in which he lives.. .[A]rt in painting should consist only of the representation of things which that are visible and tangible to the artist. Every age should be represented only by its own artists, that is to say, by the artist who have lived in it. I also maintain that painting is an essentially concrete art form and can exist only of the representation of both real and existing things.. .An abstract object, not visible, nonexistent, is not within the domain of painting."

"To know in order to do, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal. (Gustave Courbet, 1855) - note"

"I have studied the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I no longer wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of "art for art's sake". No! I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality."

"Without expanding on the greater or lesser accuracy of a name which nobody, I should hope, can really be expected to understand, I will limit myself to a few words of elucidation in order to cut short the misunderstandings."

"The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830. Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary."

"When I got back to Ornans, I spent a few days hunting. I quite like the subject of violent exercise...It makes the most surprising painting you can imagine. There are thirty life-size figures in it. It is the moral and physical history of my studio"

"In spite of being assailed by hypochondria, I have launched into an enormous painting 20 feet by 12, perhaps even bigger than Burial', which will show that I am still alive, and so is Realism, as Realism exists...It is society at its best, its worst, its average. In short, it's my way of seeing society with all its interests and passions. It's the whole world coming to me to be painted.."

"I heard the comments of the crowd in front of the painting of Burial at Ornans, I had the courage to read the nonsense that was printed regarding this picture and I wrote this article.. [in Le Messager de l'Assemblée]"

"[I] painted the very people who had been present at the interment, all the townspeople."

"[I]n our civilized society I must lead the life of a savage. I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lies with the people; I must go to them directly. I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian."

"It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning."

"I've already done studies [for his large-scale painting w:The Burial at Ornans ] of the mayor, who weighs 400, the parish priest, the justice of the peace, the cross bearer, the notary Marlet, the assistant mayor, my friends, my father, the choirboys, the grave digger, two old revolutionaries from [17]'93..."

"It is the most wretched spectacle you can imagine. I won't fight for two reasons: firstly because I have no faith in waging war with guns and cannons, and it is not part of my creed. For ten years I have been fighting a war of wits. I would not be true to myself if I acted otherwise. Secondly, I have no weapons and I won't be persuaded. So you have nothing to fear where I am concerned"

"[T]here's nothing harder in the world than making art, particularly when no one understands it. Women want portraits without shadow, men want to be dressed up in their Sunday best; there's no way out. To earn money with things like that, you'd be better of walking on a treadmill. At least then you would not be abdicating your convictions."

"In the coming year I must do a large painting which will definitely get me recognized for what I truly am, for I want all or nothing. All those little paintings are not the only thing that I can do...I want to do large-scale painting. One thing is certain, that within five years, I must have a name in Paris; that is what I strive for. It's hard to get there, I know...To move faster I only lack one thing, and that's money, in order to boldly execute what I have in mind."

"We finally saw the sea, the horizonless sea – how odd for a mountaindweller. We saw the beautiful boats that sail on it. It is too inviting, one feels carried away, one would leave to see the whole world."

"I started selling my portraits. Sizing up my customer, I charged ten or twenty francs a caricature, and it worked like a charm. Within a month my clientele had doubled. Had I gone on like that I'd be a millionaire today. Soon I was looked up to in the town, I was 'somebody'. In the shop-window of the one and only frame-maker who could make out a livelihood in Le Havre, my caricatures were impudently displayed, five or six abreast, in beaded frames or behind glass like very fine works of art, and when I saw troops of bystanders gazing at them in admiration, pointing at them and crying 'Why, that's so-and-so!', I was just bursting with pride."

"I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. What little I know I learned at home. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition."

"Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than Sargent thinks. But he went on to agree that impressionists had noted how strong"

"My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects, and I still very much regret having caused the naming of a group whose majority had nothing impressionist about it."

"I was thinking of preparing my palette and my brushes to resume work, but relapses and further bouts of pain prevented it. I'm not giving up that hope and am occupying myself with some major alterations in my studios and plans to perfect the garden [in Giverny ]. All this to show you that, with courage, I'm getting the upper hand. [three months before Monet died]"

"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face."

"It took me a long time to understand my water lilies.. .I planted them for pleasure, and grew them without thinking of painting them.. You don't absorb a landscape in a day.. .And then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette."

"I see less and less.. .I need to avoid lateral light, which darkens my colors. Nevertheless, I always paint at the times of day most propitious for me, as long as my paint tubes and brushes are not mixed up.. ..I will paint almost blind, as Beethoven composed completely deaf."