Page 9 - Courbet

FOREWORD

T his is the 50th catalogue that we have published since 1978 and therefore must constitute some-
thing of a milestone. I fear there will not be a further fifty to follow. Yet for our avid readers I can
add, in consolation, that there are two publications in progress for 2017-18 and still one more
to carry us towards the end of the decade, after which, as the Italians say…’Basta!’

My hands-on experience with the paintings of Courbet has, alas, been somewhat limited.Whereas my father
during the post-war years handled several landscapes and the sumptuous Reclining Nude which was acquired by
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1957, I have only managed a connection with two outstanding works by the
artist.The first was a Bouquet de Fleurs of great beauty which we owned with Stair Sainty.This painting refocussed
an interest in Courbet.The second was a refined seascape, Vue d’une mer agitée près d’une falaise, which I sold to
The Princeton University Museum in 2008.The retrospective exhibition at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier that
same year catapulted my awareness of the artist onto an entirely different plane. I was profoundly impressed
and of course coveted all the paintings which were in the Musée d’Orsay, the likes of which one could never
hope to own. A few years ago I was not proactive enough to secure a magnificent winter landscape and I have
regretted this ever since.When I chanced upon the unpublished Mother and Child on a Hammock I knew at once
I just had to have the picture1. Moreover, upon reading the artist’s letters I grew evermore intrigued by his
character, his ultra-macho attitudes and his affair withVirginie Binet.This all appeared to me so contemporary!
The male ego thrust to the fore, followed later by a typical masculine reaction, or should one say retraction,
which leads to whingeing about a ‘lost love’. Many of us will have travelled this path, maybe in the ‘rites of
passage’, maybe later and, accordingly, have our girlfriends not suffered as the victims of our hubris? I blush to

1. This proved somewhat complex. At the point of sale I tres) yacht as a guest with fourteen others, whose bathing
was sailing singlehanded in northern Maine close to the expedition that day Giacomo curtailed by insisting that the
Canadian border. There is no cell coverage there. I asked yacht put into Mykonos so that he could successfully tele-
Giacomo Algranti to cover, but he was also sailing, but in phone to secure the picture.
greater luxury, in the Mediterranean on a 160ft (48.5 me-

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