Courbet, GUSTAVE, painter, was born at Ornans, Franche-Comté, on the 10th of June 1819. In 1839 he was sent by his father, a well-to-do farmer, to study law in Paris, but all the bent of his singularly strong and self-assertive nature was turned towards art. He made himself acquainted with the Flemish, Florentine, and Venetian schools; but amid all he was careful to preserve—as he phrases it—his 'own intelligent and independent individuality.' In 1841 he took to landscape work, painting in the forest of Fontainebleau. In 1844 he began to exhibit at the Salon; and his works created a great sensation when shown in the Salon of 1850. Marred by frequent coarseness, and by defects of drawing, Courbet's works possess fine and powerful colour, and are valuable for their firm basis in actual fact, for their truth to an individual and personal impression of nature. His hunting scenes and animal subjects are especially vigorous and spirited. In 1869 he accepted the
Cross of the Order of St Michael from the king of Bavaria, and after the revolution of 1870 he was appointed Director of the Fine Arts. In the following year he joined the Commune, and was concerned in the destruction of the Vendôme Column (16th May), for which, in the following September, he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment, and to be fined for its restoration, his pictures being sold in 1877 towards that purpose. On his release he retired to Vevey in Switzerland, where he died, 31st December 1877. An exhibition of nearly two hundred of his works was brought together in the École des Beaux Arts, Paris, in 1882. See the Century for February 1884.