Works by Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet set out to paint only what he could see, in rough paint that kept the irregularities of nature, and around 1850 often gave peasants and workers the grand scale of religious and history painting.

His sisters were his first models, and in the 1850s he painted ordinary people and friends. In The Wheat Sifters of 1854–55 a young woman in red kneels, back to us, shaking a sieve held out at head height, while a drowsy companion picks through grain in a dish and a boy peers into a wooden bin. Young Ladies Beside the Seine caused a scandal at the Salon of 1857: critics used to nudes in landscapes found modern women instead, one stretched out in a heap of white lace and petticoats.

From 1857 he also painted hunts, and showing them beside his scandals brought sales as well as notoriety. In Fox in the Snow a fox stretches low over a small kill, a fleck of red beside it. Landscapes and seascapes are common below. He went often to France's northern shore to paint the sea; in The Black Rocks at Trouville a rust-red sky with smudged grey clouds fills most of the canvas above a thin band of sea.

Jailed for six months for his part in the Paris Commune of 1871, he was later told to pay to rebuild the Vendôme Column, whose fall he had urged, and went to Switzerland to escape bankruptcy. He was still at work on Les Dents du Midi, seen across Lake Geneva, when he died at the end of 1877, on the eve of the first instalment; its lower right corner is unfinished.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris, Nantes Museum of Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art.