Page 52 - Courbet

which form long seams from top to bottom.’69 Paul

Cézanne referred to Courbet as a builder:‘He slapped

paint on the way a plasterer slaps on stucco – a real

colour grinder. He built like a Roman mason. But he

was also a real painter. There hasn’t been another in
our century who can match him...’70 Nothing is static

Fig. 56. Cham, TheWave, by Courbet, “Permettez-moi de vous in Courbet’s painting, just as nineteenth-century man
offrir une tranche de cette peinture légère,” Caricature from had learned there is nothing static on earth.
Cham au Salon de 1870, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Our relation to the image differs from that of our

relation to reality because, at the same time as Courbet

faithfully produces the illusion of reality, we experience

him living it through his act of painting.The eye follows

his recreation of it through handwork that allows, even

encourages, the eye to explore behind surfaces, to enter

the interstices between dabs and layers of paint and to

complete them through imagination. One speaks of

open brushwork: its very openness is inviting. And if

we find the cave forbidding, the proximity to which we

are brought through Courbet’s handling contributes to

a tension that informs our experience of the painting

(Fig. 57). This sense of nature conveyed through

Fig. 57. Grotte de la Sarrazine, c. 1864,The J. Paul Getty Courbet’s technique comes naturally to him. He does
Museum, Los Angeles. not have to be told that the earth is a realm of the living.
He claimed that one can only paint a landscape that one
knows, as he does.71 He hunts, he explores; he lives and breathes the landscape he loves.

And so, whatever his frustrations and failures, Courbet’s paintings exude a love of the physical. In his early
paintings the physical is expressed through the realism of his portraits, the voluptuousness of his nudes, the
coarseness of his country folk and, later, the material actuality of his landscapes.That is, the sense that the objects
represented are available to the touch. He is a master at creating not simply an illusion of reality, but the actual
tactile feel of it. In Mother and Child on a Hammock, both the elegance of the figures and the sentimentality of their

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