‹#› 0 5. Courbet Kenneth G. Hay Professor Emeritus of Contemporary Art Practice, The University of Leeds, UK ‹#› 1 Despair.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Despair”, Oil on Canvas, 45 x 54 cm (1841), Private Coll. Exhibited for the first time in Vienna, 1873, In the Courbet sale of 1881. Born Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet on 10 June 1819 in Ornans, a village in the Loue Valley, not far from Besançon. The region of Franche Compte was also birthplace to Fourier, Proudhon, and Victor Hugo, all of whom were important to Courbet. His father Eeonor Régis Courbet was a small but dedicated landowner with a farm at Flagey, about 10 miles from Ornans. A deep feeling for the countryside, the village, peasant life and the rocky landscape of Ornans, remained constants in his work. Of his four younger sisters, Juliette, the youngest, was the closest to him, and gave him role-models for honest, hard-working and trustworthy women, which contrasted with his experiences later on in the city. Aged 12, he was given his first drawing lesson by Father Beau at the little seminary in Ornans. At 18 he entered the Collège Royal in Besançon as well as the painting classes of Charles Antoine Flajoulot, a follower of Jacques Louis David. There he met Max Buchon, whose “Essais Politiques’ he illustrated, and whose political views he shared. His college years were not happy ones though, and when he arrived in Paris in 1840, he felt that he was startng all over again. Nevertheless, Flajoulet’s teachings did give him the necessary classical painting skills to be able to produce the first “Self Portrait”, above. Still in the late-Romantic style, with its emphasis on dramatic lighting and exaggerated expression, it nevertheless is a fully competent painting. On Flajoulot’s death in 1840, Courbet signed on to the studio of Parisian liberal painter Hesse, and spent much time in the Museums studying past masters, with ambitious project: “The only way is to go like lightning through these different approaches” in order to achieve “from the very first, paintings which will equal the best works in our museums.” He made copies of Venetian, Flemish, Dutch and Spanish masters, but it was the work of Delacroix, Géricault and Gros that inspired him the most. Their energy and ambition, allied to Courbet’s nascent socialism, were what formed his art. ‹#› 2 Self with black dog.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Self Portrait with a Black Dog” (1842), oil on canvas 46 x 56 cm, Petit Palais, Paris A decidedly independent and provocative artist, Gustave Courbet built his reputation in defiance of the imperial regime. And his success came as much from the scandals which he repeatedly provoked by his paintings at the Salons as with the combative relations which he had with the administrators of French Fine Arts. Through his extraordinary temperament and huge ego, he faced off 'the powers that were' without fear, refusing commissions and sales, organising his own personal exhibition on the fringes of the Universal Exhibitions of 1855 and of 1867 and, his supreme act of hubris, refusing membership of the Légion d'honneur in 1870. In view of his complete detachment from the institutional art world of the period and the development of his own personal distribution network, his career looks remarkably modern. ‹#› 3 Juliette Courbet 1844 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Juliette Courbet” (1844), 78 x 62 cm Petit Palais, Paris Rejected by the Salon of 1845 where it was presented with title “Baroness de M”, it was exhibited at the artist’s first retrospective in Paris, 1882. ‹#› 4 “Man with Leather Belt” (c.1845) •The work straddles two worlds..The pose and hands and forearm, and the facial expression are unmistakenly 19th-century. The attributes of the artists: portfolio, book of prints, cast and chalk in its holder are managed deftly, but the colour sense is clear and dramatic - the crisp cuff against a black tunic is reminiscent of Titian, Giorgione and the Venetian Renaissance. •Courbet is looking back to classic art and imbuing it with a 19th-century Romantic sentiment. Untitled-1.psd 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: ‹#› 5 Courbet,”Man with a Pipe”(c.1846-47) • • When the critics saw it in 1851 they called it with some justification, “An imitation of Guercino” - It has the same casual handling, the same clear oval face marked with deep shadow round the eyes. But it is typical of Courbet that the painting should have another source in : Adriaen Brouwer’s self portrait as a “Smoker” (below) Untitled-2.psd 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Brouwer.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Courbet journeyed to Holland in 1847 to study the Rembrandts and other Dutch Masters, and returned particularly impressed with Frans Hals. The Dutch school shared his celebration of everyday pleasures and fresh direct handling ‹#› 6 “Portrait of Baudelaire” (1876) oil on canvas 53 x 61 cm, Montpellier, Musée Fabre: Untitled-3.psd 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: ‹#› 7 Dormeuse.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “La Dormeuse” (1849) Oil on canvas, 65 x 53 cm, Paris, private coll • Unsigned and dated, but Toussaint (1969) has identified it as exhibited at the 1849 private exhibition of the artist’s works.(1869). • Reflects the influence of Rembrandt’s work, seen in Holland in 1847. Sold in 1881, it was bought by Juliette Courbet and later by Matisse. ‹#› 8 after-dinner-at-ornans.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “After Dinner at Ornans” (1849), Lille, Musée des Beaux Arts 195 x 257 cm Exhibited at the Salon of 1849 and won the second gold medal and was bought by the State. The first two figures on the left are Courbet’s father and Courbet himself. The violinist is his friend Promayet. ‹#› 9 Le Nain.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Louis Le Nain, “Peasant’s Lunch” (1642) Paris, Louvre ‹#› 10 Timothy J.Clark •“Image of the People: •Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution.” •(London, 1973) •Landmark in the social history of art. •Explores the interrelatinships of painting, politics and publics. Clark_Courbet.jpg 00000002KINGSTON 00000000: ‹#› 11 Blanqui.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Pierre Jean David D’Angers (1840) “Portrait of Louis AugusteBlanqui” • A police spy sat next to Courbet in the pub one day in 1873 and reported back on his beer-drinking, garrulous, impatient, eloquent political demeanour: He had, he noted: ‘the air of a jeering peasant.’ • Clourbet himself observed: “Behind this laughing mask of mine which you know, I conceal grief and bitterness, and a sadness which clings to my heart like a vampire. In the society I which we live, it doesn’t take much effort to reach the void” (letter to Alfred Bruyas, Nov. 1854). Blanqui was a leading revolutionary figure in the 1840s whom Courbet much admired. His brother Adolphe was a conservative economist and observer of peasant life and the ascension of peasant power in the Assembly. ‹#› 12 pubtalk.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: G. Courbet, “The Brasserie Andler”(1848) ‹#› 13 Courbet_Stonebreakers.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The Stonebreakers” (1849, destroyed 1945), 159 x 169 cm, formerly Gemälde Galerie, Dresden. Presented at the Salon in 1850. The Stone Breakers, painted in 1849, depicts two ordinary peasant workers. Courbet painted without any apparent sentiment; instead, he let the image of the two men, one too young for hard labor and the other too old, express the feelings of hardship and exhaustion that he was trying to portray. Courbet shows sympathy for the workers and disgust for the upper class by painting these men with a dignity all their own. ‹#› 14 4.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Henry Wallis, “The Stonebreaker”, (1857), 65 x 79 cm. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery It depicts a manual labourer who appears to be asleep, worn out by his work, but has actually been worked to death. The painting was first exhibited in 1858 at the Royal Academy in London and was highly acclaimed. Many viewers assumed the man was sleeping, worn out by his day of hard but honest labour. Wallis gave no outright statement that the man depicted was dead, but there are many suggestions to this effect. The frame was inscribed with a line paraphrased from Tennyson's A Dirge (1830): "Now is thy long day's work done"; the muted colours and setting sun give a feeling of finality; the man's posture indicates that his hammer has slipped from his grasp as he was working rather than being laid aside while he rests, and his body is so still that a stoat, only visible on close examination, has climbed onto his right foot. The painting's listing in the catalogue was accompanied by a long passage from Thomas Carlyle's "Helotage", a chapter in his Sartor Resartus, which extols the virtues of the working man and laments that "thy body like thy soul was not to know freedom". Wallis is believed to have painted The Stonebreaker as a commentary on the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 which had formalised the workhouse system for paupers and discouraged other forms of relief for the poor. The able-bodied poor were forced into long hours of manual labour in order to qualify for the lodgings and food provided by the workhouse and the gruelling work sometimes resulted in the death of the workers. Carlyle's accompanying passage also has strong words for supporters of the workhouses: Perhaps in the most thickly-peopled country, some three days annually might suffice to shoot all the able-bodied Paupers that had accumulated during the year. It was later claimed that by this painting, Wallis moved away from the Pre-Raphaelite principles towards those of an early Victorian Social Realism.[1] However, for Wallis' contemporaries, The Stonebreaker consolidated his reputation as a true Pre-Raphaelite.[2] The dead man wears the smock of an agricultural labourer which suggests that in former times he would have been employed year-round on a farm. Changing social conditions have robbed him of his employment and forced him instead to accept the charity of the workhouse and the arduous job of flint-knapping to produce material for the roads. ‹#› 15 Millet.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Farm Labourers”, Jean François Millet (1814-75) ‹#› 16 Les Bêcheurs (The Diggers). 1855-56. Etching. 9 1/4 x 14 (sheet 12 3/8 x 15 7/8) Millet.2jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: ‹#› 17 “A Burial at Ornans”, (1849) Oil on Canvas, 314 x 665 cm, Paris, Louvre a-burial-at-ornans.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Mentioned in a letter to Champfleury, 1849 ‹#› 18 •1849, Courbet’s first monumental painting. • his "statement of principle" and made this clear by calling the work “Painting of Human Figures, the History of a Burial at Ornans”. • •Inspired by group portraits of Dutch civic guards in the 17th century • The rigorous frieze-like composition and the gaping grave strewn with bones invite us to think about the human condition. • •The scale of the canvas was usually reserved for History Painting, a "noble" genre, and here he has used it to present an ordinary subject, with no trace of idealisation, and which cannot pretend to be a genre scene either. • •At the Salon in 1850-1851, many people decried "the ugliness" of the people, and the ordinariness of the whole scene. Yet it is the idea of "universal understanding" which prevails, a constant preoccupation in the 19th century and for the 1848 generation in particular. • Ornans1.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: ‹#› 19 Flagey Fair.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Peasants of Flagey returning from the Fair”, (1850-51),206 x 275.5 cm Beasançon, Musée des Beaux Arts ‹#› 20 Bathers_1853.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Bathers”, (1853), oil on canvas 227 x 197 cm. Montpellier, Musée Fabre Bought by Alfred Bruyas together with the Sleeping Spinner” entered for the Salon at the same time (1853) and subsequently donated to the State. ‹#› 21 courb107.jpg 0003441B Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The Sleeping Spinner”, (1853), Oil on Canvas, 91 x 115 cm, Montpellier, Musée Fabre Bequeathed by Bruyas to Montpellier. Exhibited at the Salon of 1853 This very important painting is dealt with at length by Prudhon who emphasizes that in spite of the realistic but undidactic tone of the work, which is in fact sympathetic and affectionate towards the subject, the public were extremely hostile to it. ‹#› 22 Wounded Man.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Wounded Man” (1844--47), 81.5 x 97.5 cm, Paris, Louvre. Shown in all the artist’s personal exhibitions from 1855 onwards. Research using X-rays (1969) reveals there was originally another figure, female, (presumably Virginie Binet) his companion of”The Lovers in the Country” (1844, Lyons), who had left him. Courbet never wanted to ba parted from this painting. He began work in 1844 and submitted it to the Salons of 1844,45,46,and 47 and was always rejected. At some point he painted out the female figure and changed the mood of the rural subject into an autobiographical and symbolic theme - himself wounded by Virginie’s departure. Courbet made one or more copies of this work. ‹#› 23 Bonjour.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Bonjour M. Courbet!” (1854) One of Gustave Courbet’s most significant canvases, Good Day, Monsieur Courbet depicts a chance meeting of the painter, his patron Alfred Bruyas and Bruyas’s servant Calas, on a road outside Montpellier. The painting teases the often fraught relationship of painter and private patron. Bruyas had trained as a painter, but poor health kept him from the practice. It is possible that Bruyas-the-patron represented a surrogate Bruyas-the-painter. In courting the country’s most astute and critically-engaged contemporary painter, Bruyas made claims to the progress of contemporary painting. The painting thus marks in the most compelling way the ambition of the collector, keen to insert his own name, taste and generosity into the history of painting. Courbet was acutely aware of this relationship. Note the way in which Courbet stands on the earth; neither the deferential Bruyas nor Calas cast a shadow, as if only the painter, as labourer, is of this earth. ‹#› 24 The Wandering Jew •Linda Nochlin:, “Gustave Courbet's Meeting:A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew” •(Art Bulletin, Vol. 49 No 3) Wandering Jew.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Courbet is drawing upon popular prints, in turn deriving from mediaeval depictions of the”Wandering Jew” - the nomadic outcast, and his encounter with the local village bourgeois. ‹#› 25 Studio.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The Artist’s Studio: A True Allegory summarizing a Period of Seven years in my life as an artist” (1854-55), Oil on Canvas, 361 x 598 cm, Paris Louvre, Rejected at the Universal Salon of 1855 The enormous Studio is without doubt Courbet's most mysterious composition. However, he provides several clues to its interpretation: "It's the whole world coming to me to be painted", he declared, "on the right, all the shareholders, by that I mean friends, fellow workers, art lovers. On the left is the other world of everyday life, the masses, wretchedness, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, people who make a living from death". In the first group, those on the right, we can recognise the bearded profile of the art collector Alfred Bruyas, and behind him, facing us, the philosopher Proudhon. The critic Champfleury is seated on a stool, while Baudelaire is absorbed in a book. The couple in the foreground personify art lovers, and near the window, two lovers represent free love. On the side of "everyday life", we find a priest, a merchant, a hunter who somewhat resembles Napoleon III, and even an unemployed worker and a beggar girl symbolising poverty. We can also see the guitar, the dagger and the hat, which, together with the male model, condemn traditional academic art. In this vast allegory, truly a manifesto painting, each figure has a different meaning. And in the middle of all this stands Courbet himself, flanked by benevolent figures: a female muse, naked like the Truth, a child and a cat. In the centre, the painter presents himself as a mediator. Courbet thus affirms the artist's role in society in an enormous scene on the scale of a history painting. When faced with the rejection of his painting, intended for the 1855 Universal Exhibition, Courbet built a "Pavilion of Realism" at his own expense. Here, outside the official event, he organised his own exhibition, which also includedA Burial at Ornans, so that his work could be available to the whole of society. ‹#› 26 young-women-from-th#340D7F5.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Courbet, “The Young Women from the Village” (1851), 54 x 66 cmLeeds City Art Gallery old in 1854 by the artist and was shown in the exhibition of his work in Rue Montaigne. The landscape remains unidentifiable. ‹#› 27 Young-ladies.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine” (1857), 174 x 200 cm, Petit Palais Paris The figure in the foreground, she of the satisfied, seductive gaze, is clearly dressed in her underclothing, however prettily charming it may be. The skintight pale yellow short gloves on her relaxed and curiously delicate hands virtually beg to be slowly peeled off. Her companion appears to be both more complaisant and less interested, which generates another level of erotic charge. The moored boat containing a man's hat signifies the temporary - soon to be renewed? - presence of the male. Courbet, as a lover of women, must have delighted in this painting, but he must have suspected too that it would cause an outcry at the Salon. The very use of the term Demoiselles in the title again was a deliberate provocation; these women are as far from being proper young ladies, though in a different direction, as were Courbet's sisters on their Sunday walk. By using the honorific Courbet was not putting down either set of women; on the contrary, he was attacking the rigidities of class and asserting the validity of such different kinds of actual working women as subjects for serious painting. This alone would - and did - cause annoyance, but the more serious disturbance came from the presence of such open sexuality represented in such pointedly contemporary terms. For the Salon public, sexuality could be safely encoded in nudity, such as the polished nudity of Venuses and Dianas and allegorical or exotic figures; it could not be presented in terms of social truths close to home. Thus this painting, with all its richness of cloth and decoration, flowers and foliage, and its scarcity of bare flesh was perceived as more sexually disturbing than the nudes of conventional art. That young working women in Paris - often recent arrivals from country villages - made themselves available to gentlemen who could pay for the pleasures of a Sunday along the Seine outside the city was not a truth to be openly acknowledged in polite society, still less to be embodied in a work of art with a serious claim to public attention. Only a few years later, the equally frank but more urbane sexuality of Dejeuner sur l'Herbe of Edouard Manet would be greeted with similar fierce denial. Copy in London NG ‹#› 28 Proudhon.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “J.P.Prudhon and his Family”,(1865), 147 x 198 cm. Paris, Musée du Petit Palais On a step on the left-hand side is the inscription: P.J/P 1853. First exhibited at the Salon of 1865. Confiscated by the State in 1873 abd sold at auction in 1877 although the artist had intended it to go to Besançon. Bought for the Petit Palais in 1900. ‹#› 29 • • •Courbet presented this portrait of Proudhon at the Salon of 1865, an homage not only to the renowned anarco-socialist political theorist but also to a friend who had just died. Both men came from the French region of Franche-Comté and both shared the same political outlook. Courbet, an ardent republican, had been derided since 1850 for his kitchen-sink themes. • •His critical realism, for which he was the premier exponent, had brought him severe criticism – his subjects were working class and his manner was decried as «ugly, dirty and vulgar». • •Prudhon's last work, “Du principe de l'art et de sa destination social”e (On the principal of art and its social application), published posthumously, was similarly critical of Second Empire society and furthermore made direct reference to the painter. • Proudhon-detail.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “J.P.Prudhon and his Family”,(detail) Using photographs in his composition of the work, Courbet painted his friend in an intimate family moment. The date chosen, 1853, is that when Proudhon was released from prison – he had been incarcerated in 1849 for having defended his ideas in print. Proudhon is sitting upon some steps, the books and papers of his work beside him, apparently staring at the viewer. The peasant shirt he is wearing, given to him by a fellow inmate, is given the double symbolic charge of working class origins and political struggle. Whilst Proudhon's wife was also once in the picture, sitting sewing behind her children, Courbet subsequently painted her out when he re-painted the work after 1866, simply leaving an empty chair. The composition thereby recentred on Proudhon thus became a manifesto in honour of the man whom Courbet called the «pilot of the 19th century». ‹#› 30 Honoré Daumier, •Between 1830 and 1871 there were a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions in France. After the Revolution of 1789, Napoleon I came to power and declared himself Emperor in 1804. His First Empire was succeeded by the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy of Louis XVII (1815) which gave way to the Second Republic in 1848. This immediately (1848) then gave way to the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and then in 1870, to “The Commune”(March-May 1871). •Daumier here depicts the peasantry, now in the guise of Classical Rome, surveying their new Estate. Daumier.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: ‹#› 31 Salut public.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Courbet, “Frontispiece for Le Salut Public (Public Health) No.2, (1848)” ‹#› 32 The “June Days”(1848) •• The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848 reanimated the Revolutionary ambitions of the first French Revolution (1789). •The 1848 Revolution (February) ended the Orleans Monarchy of King Louis Philippe (1830-48) and led to the Second Republic. •In June 1848, unhappy about the conservative trend of the Second Republic’s elected government, a second, bloody but unsuccessful, rebellion by Parisian workers occurred (The June Days Uprising). •On 2 December 1848, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (nephew of Napoleon I) was elected President of the Second Republic, largely with peasant support. Three years later, he suspended the elected assembly and established the Second Empire, as Napoléon III, (the last de-facto Monarch of France) which lasted until 1870. Meissonier_Barricade.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Messonnier, “The Barricades” watercolour (1848) The 1848 Revolution in France, sometimes known as the February Revolution (révolution de Février), was one of a wave of revolutions in 1848 in Europe. In France the revolutionary events ended the Orleans monarchy (1830–1848) and led to the creation of the French Second Republic. Following the overthrow of King Louis Philippe in February 1848, the elected government of the Second Republic ruled France. In the months that followed, this government steered a course that became more conservative. On 23 June 1848, the people of Paris rose in insurrection,[1] which became known as June Days Uprising – a bloody but unsuccessful rebellion by the Paris workers against a conservative turn in the Republic's course. On 2 December 1848, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was elected President of the Second Republic, largely on peasant support. Exactly three years later he suspended the elected assembly, establishing the Second French Empire, which lasted until 1870. Louis Napoléon would go on to become the de facto last French monarch. ‹#› 33 Vendome-new.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The city of Paris has a great mast, made entirely of bronze, with sculpted Victories and Napoleon as its lookout”. ( Balzac’) The Vendôme column designed by Lepère and Gondoin and made from melting down 1200 artillery pieces taken from the Russians and Austrians. It comprises a stone core enrobed with 425 bronze plaques amounting to a 280 metre-long frieze of bas-reliefs, form the Napoleonic campaigns designed from drawings by Bergeret, and executed by a team of sculptors (including Boizot, Bosio, Bartolini, Ramey, Rude, Corbet, Clodion and Ruxthiel) Forty-two metres tall, the column was crowned with a statue of The Emperor in Roman dress. The statue was taken down by the Allies in 1814 and replaced during the Restoration by a flag bearing fleurs de lys. Under the July Monarchy this was replaced with a statue showing Napoleon as 'Little Corporal'. Dismantled during the Commune at the instigation of Gustave Courbet, the Vendôme column was restored and re-erected once more in 1873 at Courbet's expense. It was rthe casue of his imprisonmnet, bankruptcy and exile. “The city of Paris has a great mast, made entirely of bronze, with sculpted Victories and Napoleon as its lookout”. Such were Balzac's words on the Vendôme column, the obelisk which throughout the 19th century was seen as the most important symbol of Paris and upon which each government attempted to make its mark. Its chequered history is as much the history of 19th-century France. In March and June 1800, two decrees were passed ordering the erection of 'a column dedicated to the heroes of each department' in all the principal towns of France. Two columns were planned for Paris: one, a national column, to be set in the Place de la Concorde, the other, departmental, for the Place Vendôme. Nothing being done, the idea was re-proposed by the First Consul in 1803, confirming the erection of a column in Place Vendôme 'equalling that in Rome set up in honour of Trajan'. The obelisk itself was to be decorated with 108 friezes climbing spiralwards, representing the departments, and topped with a statue of Charlemagne. In 1805, the day after Austerlitz, Vivant Denon, the Director of Museums, proposed that a commemorative column be erected dedicated to the Grande Armée, using the cannons taken from the Austrians. A decree of 1806 confirmed this proposal. Astutely, Denon abandoned the idea of a column dedicated to Charlemagne, deciding rather on a 'German' column on which 'the recent campaign' was to be 'set in bronze on an eight hundred and thirty foot bas-relief frieze, representing the memorable campaign of 1805, just as the expedition against the Dacians was carved into Trajan's Column'. The column was designed by Lepère and Gondoin and received many different names – first the 'Austerlitz Column', then the 'Victory Column' finally becoming the 'Colonne de la Grande Armée'. Lepère supervised the melting down of the 1200 artillery pieces taken from the Russians and Austrians. The following inscription was engraved on the abacus of the capital: 'Monument erected to the glory of Napoleon the Great's Grande Armée, begun on 25 August 1806 and finished 15 August 1810'. The column comprises a stone core enrobed with 425 bronze plaques fixed to the stone with pins. A 280 metre-long frieze of bas-reliefs, designed from drawings by Bergeret, winds round the column depicting the major events of the campaign – from the camp in Boulogne to the return of the Emperor and his guard in 1806. A team of sculptors (including Boizot, Bosio, Bartolini, Ramey, Rude, Corbet, Clodion and Ruxthiel) was commissioned to execute the frieze. Forty-two metres tall, the column was crowned with a statue commissioned from Chaudet of The Emperor in Roman dress. The statue was taken down by the Allies in 1814 and replaced during the Restoration by a flag bearing fleurs de lys. Under the July Monarchy this was replaced with a statue by Seurre showing Napoleon as 'Little Corporal', a statue today held in the Invalides. During Second Empire, a copy of Chaudet's initial statue designed by Dumont was hoisted to the top of the column to replace that by Seurre. Dismantled during the Commune at the instigation of Gustave Courbet, the Vendôme column was restored and re-erected once more in 1873 at Courbet's expense. ‹#› 34 Commune.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: Place Vendôme, Paris, with collapsed column, 1871 ‹#› 35 the-trout.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The Trout”, (1871). Paris private collection, 65 x 99cm The moment between life and death, the sensation of dying rather than the meaning of death, as the subject of a work of art is found in its most distilled, prosaic and poignant form in Courbet’s Trout, where the animal is suspended between the hook and the stream, presented in all its scaly concreteness in the tightly restricted framework of compressed pictorial space, on the pebbly beach speckled with its blood. It is difficult by definition to make a fish dramatic, unless it is a shark or whale..The same moment between life and death in an animal painter like Landseer ennobles the creature. Here Courbet, because thew trout is, after all ,associated with cooking and eating, lacks such nobility and drama - and because Courbet has reduced the setting and circumstances to the minimum, we are hard pressed to see in it an allegory of Courbet’s own sense of entrapment after the Commune, on the hook of judicial retribution. Courbet was an enthusiastic hunter and fisherman, and has merely captured and done justice to his catch. ‹#› 36 self in jail.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “Courbet in Sainte-Pélagie”, Ornans, civic Collection 92 x 72.5 cm (1871) Neither signed nor dated. Given by Juliette Courbet to the Town of Ornans in 1903. First mentioned by Estingnard in 1897. This is Courbet’s last self-portrait. He had stopped painting self-portraits for the previous 15 years, but painted this one in prison as a record of his fate. Courbet was sentenced to six months in prison for his part in the destruction of the Vendôme Column in 1871. His last few months of confinement were in the Hospital in Neuilly. ‹#› 37 Calf.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The Calf” (1873), 88 x 116 cm. Paris, Coll. L. Bénatov Painted in Ornans on the eve of his departure into exile. When the farmer who owned the calf knew that Courbet was going to paint it, he carefully washed and combed it. In spite f the refinement of the painting, Courbey was obviously paying homage to Dutch painting, in particular tot eh Bull by Paulus Potter in the Hague. With Courbet’s permission, Cherubino Pata made several copies of the painting. ‹#› 38 Chillon.jpg 0340B226 Ken's G5HD_01 BC85B848: “The Château at Chillon”(1875), 62 x 69, Lons-le Saunier Museum Given to the Museum by Mazarov, the work’s first owner. This is one of tge views of Lake Geneva which Courbet loved to paint while in exile. Many of them were entirely or almost entirely painted by assistants. A list made by Courbet’s friend Doctor Blondon, which includes this painting, documents the originals of this period.