Gustave Courbet Prints
1819–1877 · French · Realism
Wall art by Gustave Courbet, restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte fine-art paper.
8 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet was born in 1819 at Ornans in the Franche-Comté, the son of a prosperous farming family, and never stopped painting the limestone valleys, hunters and villagers of his home. He came to Paris in 1839, taught himself by copying in the Louvre and made his name at the Salon of 1850–51 with A Burial at Ornans and The Stone Breakers, ordinary country people painted at the scale previously reserved for kings and saints. The scandal founded Realism; when the 1855 Exposition rejected The Painter's Studio he built his own Pavilion of Realism beside it. He painted waves, deer, snow and frank nudes with a palette knife and a thick, physical paint. A republican and friend of Proudhon, he was blamed for the destruction of the Vendôme Column during the Paris Commune, imprisoned and ordered to pay for its rebuilding, and fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1877.