Page 45 - Courbet

and Ornans, the environs of which are represented in most of his works.There is simply no question that these
surroundings were consoling to Courbet, who undoubtedly turned his loneliness to advantage by trekking out
in all seasons to paint forest interiors, wild game and the springs and streams he adored.

There are two complementary sides to Courbet’s painting of his native countryside. On the one hand there
are hunting scenes including images of animals, living or not, that are human prey. Such pictures display
the signs of domineering male activity. On the other hand there are scenes of solitude in which one feels
immersed in the painter’s natural surroundings, as if nestling sensually into nature’s arms or gathering at
nature’s bosom.Among the latter is a special category consisting of deep caverns from which rushing waters
often spill forth.The latter are the literal sources or wellsprings without overt allegory both for rivers that
sustain the life of the Doubs region within Franche-Comté and for Courbet’s art. One of those paintings,
The Source of the Loue (Fig. 51), represents the monumental emergence of the river that flowed through
Ornans itself from under the ground. Courbet’s family home was on its banks, across from the town’s main
square. He undoubtedly crossed it almost every day; it was at the centre of his workaday life.

Courbet’s hunting scenes represent a realm of masculine vigour to which nothing in Paris could compare. In
the Realist Manifesto that accompanied Courbet’s famous private Realism exhibition of 1855 opposite the
grounds of the official Exposition Universelle, Courbet declared that his aim was ‘To be able to translate the
customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own appreciation of it [to be not only a painter
but a man], in a word, to create living art, that is my goal.’57 The words ‘to be not only a painter but a man’ are
in some versions of the Manifesto, not in others.58 Their effect is to make explicit Courbet’s obsession with
masculinity. The freedom implied by ‘my own appreciation of it’ challenges the formulas transmitted by the
academy to which artists were expected to conform. Being ‘a man’ was to be independent, unlike the female
role as he undoubtedly viewed it in the light of his friend Proudhon. ‘To create living art’ can be understood
to mean art that is authentic because it is lived by the artist himself. Obviously this aim is only possible if the
artist limits himself to what he can observe and experience, namely‘the customs, the ideas and the appearance’
of his times. When in 1861 a group of students pleaded with Courbet to open a studio where he would be
the teacher, Courbet wrote an open letter urging that ‘every artist should be his own teacher.’ He added that
‘painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. …
Imagination in art consists in knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing thing, but never
in inventing or creating that thing itself.’59

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