Page 31 - Courbet

Fig. 27. The Studio of the Painter:A Real Allegory Determining Seven Years of my Life Fig. 28. The Grainsifters, 1854, Musée des
as an Artist, 1855, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

I devoted a book to the topic when I discovered how Courbet’s famous The Studio of the Painter:A Real Allegory
Determining Seven Years of my Life as an Artist (Fig. 27) was directly patterned on a relatively short work by
Proudhon entitled Philosophie du Progrès (1853).40 Courbet had surely read it and probably discussed it with
Proudhon when the artist visited him in prison. Not only is Proudhon present in The Studio, as explained in a
long letter about the painting to Champfleury, but Courbet used terminology adapted directly from Proudhon’s
thinking for that explanation.Yet one aspect of Proudhon’s thought, ostensibly absent from The Studio, which
strengthened Courbet’s resolve towards women was the role Proudhon attributed to the female in society.41

Proudhon’s masculinist attitudes are best known today through his book La Pornocratie, ou Les Femmes dans les
temps modernes (1875). However, that volume was published posthumously, 10 years after Proudhon’s death. In
his lifetime, Proudhon’s anti-feminism emerged from other writings and his public pronouncements.With the
Revolution of 1848, women again began claiming their rights as they had during the first French Revolution.
Rebuffed as far as inclusion in universal suffrage, which was limited to males, women did achieve the right to
work as equals to men. Proudhon objected strenuously, not just to the women’s vote, but also to female labour
outside the home.42 Although many rural women toiled on farms, they were generally family members rather
than wage workers. Courbet’s Grainsifters (Fig. 28) confirms that characterisation with its two young women
and a young boy working in a family granary.

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