Page 21 - Courbet

are crowded together however, producing a scene far less idyllic than ours. At the centre is a boy, perhaps the
young Alfred-Emile himself or an allusion to him. Both he and the father look out of the image, while the two
females focus on the child. One is tempted to conclude that male figures look outward toward their role in the
world, while females focus on the home. Might the drawing suggest a tension between these contrasting views?
Is the tightness of the group a bit uncomfortable? No matter how one reads it, the drawing casts a different light
on the idea of domestic bliss to that presented in our newly discovered painting.

Julie, Gustave’s sister in Ornans, added a complicating factor to the artist’s romance. It was she to whom Gustave
was always the closest and it was also she who disapproved ofVirginie, as well as of marriage in general.7 Maybe
she had feminist tendencies, which had at first emerged during the French Revolution and then were revived
in the 1840s.8 On Courbet’s death, Julie inherited the contents of his studio, including numerous letters
and drawings. Many of them she sold or gave to various museums, but it is said she destroyed the youthful
correspondence between Gustave andVirginie.9 The birth of Alfred-Emile, even if it was a happy event for the
two lovers, ultimately became a source of conflict thus involving the Courbet family. In addition, if we are to
believe Courbet’s statement to his friend Champfleury (Jules-François-Félix Fleury-Husson), which is cited
immediately below, it was also a distraction from his work. In the year following the child’s birth, the February
Revolution was to preoccupy the painter for whose career it created a crucial break. He threw himself into art
and politics with a single-minded seriousness and persistence that would have immediate consequences.

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O nce Courbet learned, through Champfleury, thatVirginie had left him, he replied‘May her life be easy,
since she thinks she can do better. I miss my little boy, but I have enough to do without taking care of
a family; what’s more, for me a married man is a reactionary.’10 The theme of disappointed love was
a familiar Romantic motif, from the suicide of Goethe’s young Werther to Germont and Violetta in Verdi’s La
Traviata (1853), which was based on Alexandre Dumas the younger’s novel La Dame aux Camélias, published in
1848 and quickly turned into a play.Although it came a half century later, Puccini’s famous La Bohème was based
on another Romantic novel, Scènes de la vie de Bohème published in 1851 by Courbet’s friend Henri Murger.
It combined a love story with the theme of the struggling artist. Although both Dumas’ and Murger’s books
postdate Courbet’s painting, both were set in the Paris of Courbet’s time. Dumas’ unlucky heroine was based on

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