Page 41 - Courbet

Courbet’s Origin of theWorld might ironically call forth the connection between woman and nature through the
concept of motherhood, connecting to our painting of Mother and Child on a Hammock.

In the nineteenth century, landscape emerged as a dominant theme in the art of painting. As bourgeois
patronage flourished, painters took to landscape as a genre accessible to a broad public and requiring none
of the training in classical languages and literatures that history painting demanded. In an increasingly
secular and scientific world, landscape painting exemplified two ostensibly contradictory yet interrelated
desires. First, there was an increasing expectation that truth in art be derived from the study of reality
rather than idealised models from the art of the past. The dominant culture of natural sciences made trips
to so-called classical landscapes in places like Italy seem inauthentic especially when the resulting imagery
was framed in stage-like compositions handed down from Old Masters. Second, as modernity made cities
and urban life the centre of bourgeois culture, landscape painting vicariously embodied escape from crowds,
noise, foul odours, dirt, workaday pressures and social intermixing. Like weekenders and tourists, painters
found access to the countryside easier than in previous centuries, thanks to the development of the railway
infrastructure for which the workers in Courbet’s Stonebreakers were most likely labouring.

Since the end of the previous century, nature had been viewed as a realm of virtue and freedom, promoted
primarily through the writings of the Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s famous
Social Contract begins with the sentence ‘Man was born free but is everywhere in chains.’55 That is, freedom
is man’s natural state but social conventions have enslaved him. Rousseau urged a return to nature based on
living away from modern civilisation. Children should be educated according to simple laws of nature rather
than codes of polite society. Figures represented in natural settings were presumed to enjoy the social freedom
and intellectual-creative inspiration proffered by their surroundings, thanks to the absence of arbitrary and
corrupted contemporary rules of thought and behaviour. From these ideas came the notion of the country life
and its traditional folk as more naturally virtuous than those who lived in cities of sin like Paris. It was upon
this myth that romantic literature, including the novels of George Sand and Courbet’s friend Champfleury,
was founded and to which Courbet first turned in his rustic The After-Dinner at Ornans (Fig. 24). Courbet’s
references to his provincial origins were related to this sense of the moral superiority of the provinces, their
ostensible lack of sophistication being a positive alternative to Parisian arrogance.

The outdoor setting for Mother and Child on a Hammock fits perfectly into this context, for what better indication
of virtue and the natural education of children than their presence in an idyllic countryside? Even the undone

41