United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Many very good painters, like my master, Courbet, have given it up. 'Corbet! he replied contemptuously; 'he didn't give it up; he never even seen it. But don't I know it's hard, sir? For years I tried to paint it, and I never got nothing but the fog; when I put in more I lost that.
We must go to Gustave Courbet for a like violence of temperament; both men painted con furia; both were capable of debauches in work; Goya could have covered the walls of hell with diabolic frescoes. In music three men are of a like ilk: Berlioz, Paganini, Liszt. Demoniacal, charged with electric energy, was this trinity, and Goya could have made it a quartet.
At first he frequented the Académie Suisse, where he encountered as fellow-workers Pissarro and Guillaumin. He soon transferred his easel to the Beaux-Arts and became an admirer of Delacroix and Courbet.
From the outset it must not be forgotten that Impressionism has been propagated by men who had all been Realists; that means by a reactionary movement against classic and romantic painting. This movement, of which Courbet will always remain the most famous representative, has been anti-intellectual. It has protested against every literary, psychologic or symbolical element in painting.
The cloud, the cliff, the mass, the path that is all. And it is enough. The annoyances of the day, the seductions of fresh impressions of newer subjects, the weakness of the flesh do not deter him. With a single aim, to the exclusion of all else, and with a direct simplicity, he records what he saw, and lo! we have a poem. Such a man was Courbet, Corot, Dupré.
The works of Dubray, Triquetti, Yvon, Giraud, Gerome, Dubufe, Toulmouche, Courbet, Troyon, Rosa Bonheur and others exhibited the route toward the naturalistic taken by her modern school, so different from that pursued by the Pre-Raphaelites in England.
One can never think of Davies as one thinks of Courbet and of Cézanne, where the intention is first and last a technically esthetic one; especially in Cézanne, whose object was the removal of all significance from painting other than that of painting for itself. With Cézanne it was problem. One might even say it was the removal of personality.
Just as he had been under the influence of Courbet when he painted his big iron forge picture which, with the French theatre subject, hangs in the National Gallery, Berlin so he felt in the latter the impact of the new Impressionistic school with its devotion to pure colour, air, and rhythm.
His collections were very fine, but he had always been afraid of their being damaged, and did not show them to strangers. When the Commune sent the painter Courbet to appraise their value, he estimated the bronzes alone at $300,000. M. Thiers' collection of Persian, Chinese, and Japanese curios was also almost unique.
We all know what happened in 1871. An artist, we should have thought, would be the last person to lead the iconoclasts in such an outrage. But M. Courbet has attained an immortality like that of Erostratus by the part he took in pulling down the column. It was restored in 1874.
Word Of The Day