Page 29 - Courbet

Fig. 25. Man Mad with Fear, or Suicide, Landscape Fig. 26. X-Ray Photograph of The Bathers, showing
of 1848, 1848, oil on canvas, mounted on wood, remnants of ClassicalWalpurgis Night and Man Delivered
Najionalmuseet for Kunst Arkitektur og Design, from Love by Death, Musée du Louvre.
Olso.

into the sometimes coarse, homely and politically challenging realities of the workaday provincial present.36

That he was far from forgetting the ordeals of his romance with Virginie is evidenced by a painting that he
quickly covered up. The results of X-ray examination in the conservation laboratory of the Louvre show
that Courbet’s Bathers, which had reused the canvas from his classical Walpurgis Night of 1848, had a highly
interesting intermediate stage. At some time between 1848, when he exhibited the Walpurgis Night, and 1852
when he began The Bathers – thus the yearVirginie left Paris – Courbet painted over the Walpurgis Night with a
composition called Man Delivered from Love by Death.

For this new if short-lived picture, Courbet used a figure from an early unfinished, now well-known self-
portrait, Man Mad with Fear (Fig. 25).37 The result was a large composition, partly visible in the laboratory’s
X-ray study, which clearly shows the protagonist from Man Mad with Fear at its top (Fig. 26). Art historian
Sylvain Amic has written brilliantly about these transformations. He re-dates the self-portrait Man Mad with

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