Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet was a French painter whose work helped define nineteenth-century Realism through the scale of familiar subjects. A Burial at Ornans gives a local funeral the dimensions of history painting. The Artist's Studio places painting itself within a gathering of figures; after its rejection by the Exposition Universelle in 1855, Courbet included it in his own exhibition. Portraits, hunting scenes, and landscapes with visibly worked paint broaden his practice beyond these large compositions.