Page 22 - Courbet

the courtesan and sometime mistress, Marie Duplessis, who died in 1847 with both her husband and her lover
at her bedside. Murger’s original took its models from among writers and artists of the Latin Quarter from the
1840s.That group included Courbet and his friends such as Alexandre Schanne. Schanne is the figure at the table
with Courbet in The Draught Players; he is immortalised as Schaunard in Murger’s novel and then in La Bohème.
He later wrote memoirs of this period of their lives in which Courbet features prominently.11

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W hen Courbet himself turned to a literary source however, it was to Ovid’s classics. Art historian
Ségolène Le Men has shown how Courbet’s Wounded Man (Fig. 16) is based on the impossible
love of Pyramus for the nymph Thisbe.12 It is generally agreed that this picture, a self-portrait, is
related to Courbet’s breakup with Virginie. An earlier drawing shows the artist in a similar pose accompanied
by a young woman (Fig. 17). In the final composition, presumably reworked after Virginie’s departure, the
woman is absent, the man’s shirt is stained with blood and a sword is resting against a tree to the left. Exactly
when Courbet reconceived the picture cannot be known, but it was prior to its appearance at his famous
Realism exhibition of 1855.13

By contrast, a precise literary source for Mother and Child with Hammock is hard to ascertain. It seems that
Courbet’s sisters read books by George Sand, whose novels featured strong and independent heroines. It is
improbable that Courbet’s conventionally sweet young mother would be found among them. Still, Sand was
among the most notorious authors of the 1840s. Courbet’s earliest biographer, Théophile Silvestre mentions
that the painter made a ‘mauvais tableau’ after reading Sand’s Lélia (1833).14 Courbet himself refers to Sand
in a letter to his patron, Alfred Bruyas, of May 1854: referring to his self-portrait Man with Leather Belt
(Fig. 18), the painter calls himself ‘a man in the ideal of absolute love in the manner of Goethe, George Sand,
etc.’15 One thinks of Goethe’s Faust’s self-destructive love for Marguerite, which had been popularised in the
1820s and 1830s and, based on which, Eugène Delacroix made a group of lithographs. Man with Leather Belt,
generally dated 1845-46, was executed at a time when Courbet was in love with Virginie. His image of the
artist as melancholy dreamer, his chalk holder and portfolio set aside, may refer not simply to the Romantic
artist’s inspiration from inner thoughts and feelings – a familiar theme, which Courbet would soon discard
when accepting the mantle of Realism – but, in retrospect, to the distractions from the labours required of

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