Page 27 - Courbet

Village Maidens, (Fig. 29)] earned me, but I don’t care because when I’m no longer controversial I’ll no longer
be important.’29 Certainly Virginie’s departure in 1852 was a blow to the ego of a painter whose name was
now all over the press.30 Man with Leather Belt, however, gives little hint that such thoughts of love could lead
to conflict or frustration. If they existed at all this early in his romance, he seems to have channelled them
to the service of his art.

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In 1854, Courbet wrote again of Virginie to Champfleury, informing him that his wife, as he called her,
had married. He says that his ‘spirit is sad and soul is empty, the liver and the heart devoured by bitterness.
… In Ornans, I’m sleeping with a servant, but that brings me no joy. I no longer have a woman nor a child.
It seems that poverty forced her to this extreme.That is how society swallows its people.We had been together
for 14 years.’31 At around the same time, Courbet wrote to his patron Alfred Bruyas expressing similar feelings
of bitterness and depression.32 Among the aphorisms he sent to Proudhon on learning in 1863 that the latter
would write a volume on art was one that revealed his change of heart ‘The extreme love one can have for
a woman is a sickness. It absorbs all of the thinking faculties, makes man jealous and worse than an animal.
Jealousy is a form of misplaced pride.’This was followed by ‘Work requires that one dominate one’s senses and
the preservation of authority over woman.That is why marriage should be open.’33

Thanks to Mother and Child on a Hammock therefore, it is now possible to speculate on the sincerity of Courbet’s
early love life as well as the disappointment, including possibly the anger, that its loss must surely have provoked.
Despite Courbet’s successes and celebrity, indeed his love of controversy, it seems likely that he bore the effects
of this disappointment for the rest of his life. Seeking both comfort in the landscape of his home territory as
well as controversy through his politics may be understood, among other things, as forms of compensation for
his early failures both in art and love.

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