| Young Ladies of the Village | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Gustave Courbet |
| Year | 1851-1852 |
| Medium | oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 194.9 cm× 261 cm(76.7 in× 103 in) |
| Location | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Young Ladies of the Village or The Village Maids (French - Les Demoiselles de village) is an 1852 oil on canvas painting by Gustave Courbet, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. It is signed bottom left "G. Courbet".
In the centre three young women, modelled by Courbet's three sisters Zoé, Zélie and Juliette, offer a barefoot peasant girl something to eat. One of the three holds an umbrella against the sun. A dog stands behind the trio, whilst to the right two cows graze in a hilly landscape with rocky outcrops and a sunny blue sky. The landscape draws on real locations near Ornans, Courbet's native area, and were re-used by him in other landscapes with and without human figures. [1]
In the preparatory sketch for Young Ladies (1851, Leeds Art Gallery), the same figures are placed further back within a composition more dominated by vegetation and the landscape than the final work. [2] [1] The artist later redesigned the composition for an 1862 etching published by Alfred Cadart and Jules Luquet with different use of perspective [3]
The same artist had previously painted the three sisters in his Three Sisters, the Stories of Grandmother Salvan (1846-1847, Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis).
Courbet first exhibited the work at the Paris Salon in April 1852 entitled The Village Maids give alms to a cowherd in a valley near Ornans. It was immediately bought by the duc de Morny despite a public and press polemic against the work - for example, the art critic Théophile Gautier expressesd reservations and felt the canvas was under-finished, [4] whilst Gustave Planche, Eugène Loudun and Louis Énault felt it flouted the rules of perspective in the smallness of the figures relative to the cows - they also held the portrayal of the young women to be "rather ugly" and "incongruously diminished". The painting was displayed again in the 1855 Exposition universelle, provoking yet more criticism, this time against "this representation of provincial women dressed in Parisian fashion" provoking discomfort in its viewers. The painting provoked as much or even more discussion about Courbet as his Burial at Ornans and according to Michael Fried was one of his "breakthrough canvases" as part of a deliberate strategy to arouse scandal. [5]
The poor reception of the work is explained by the social and historical context of the late Second French Republic - the rural electorate helped bring Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte to power as emperor and to keep him in power, yet the painting showed the Franche-Comté, a strongly republican area, forcing rich Parisians to face up to the harsh realities of the countryside - rather than showing an idealised, tranquil and pacified countryside, it showed a potential enemy of middle-class city-dwellers, enriched by the industrial revolution and about to take part in the 1848 Revolution. [2] Some saw the painting as the start of Courbet's political engagement, which took root both in his home-town and in his painting of the class struggle, as embodied in the tense eye contact between the women's lapdog (representing the arrogant middle class) and the young calves (symbolic of the peasant world about to erupt into rebellion). [6] Others see it as simply reusing an old philosophical archetype of generously giving charity to the poor, albeit in a balanced and distanced manner far from the Roman Catholic aesthetic rules at the forefront of other painters' work, abandoning their high level of finish and heightening the format and line.
The Duchess of Morny resold the work to the hôtel Drouot in 1878 for 5000 francs. It arrived in the USA just before 1901. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel's New York branch exhibited it in June 1906 and - after passing through a number of different hands - Harry Payne Bingham offered it to its present owners in 1940. [2] [7]
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.
Eugène Louis Boudin was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores. His pastels, summary and economic, garnered the splendid eulogy of Baudelaire; and Corot called him the "King of the skies".
Théodore Chassériau was a Dominican-born French Romantic painter noted for his portraits, historical and religious paintings, allegorical murals, and Orientalist images inspired by his travels to Algeria. Early in his career he painted in a Neoclassical style close to that of his teacher Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, but in his later works he was strongly influenced by the Romantic style of Eugène Delacroix. He was a prolific draftsman, and made a suite of prints to illustrate Shakespeare's Othello. The portrait he painted at the age of 15 of Prosper Marilhat, makes Théodore Chassériau the youngest painter exhibited at the Louvre museum.
L'Origine du monde is a picture painted in oil on canvas by the French artist Gustave Courbet in 1866. It is a close-up view of the vulva and abdomen of a nude woman, lying on a bed with legs spread.
The Painter's Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life is an 1855 oil on canvas painting by Gustave Courbet. It is located in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France.
A Burial At Ornans is a painting of 1849–50 by Gustave Courbet. It is widely regarded as a major turning point in 19th-century French art. The painting records a funeral in Courbet's birthplace, the small town of Ornans. It treats an ordinary, provincial funeral with frank realism, and on the grand scale traditionally reserved for the heroic or religious scenes of history painting. Its exhibition at the 1850–51 Paris Salon created an "explosive reaction" and brought Courbet instant fame. It is currently displayed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France.
Le ruisseau noir is an oil-on-canvas landscape painted by French artist, Gustave Courbet, in 1865. It is currently held and exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Jules-Antoine Castagnary was a French liberal politician, journalist and progressive and influential art critic, who embraced the new term "Impressionist" in his positive and perceptive review of the first Impressionist show, in Le Siècle, 29 April 1874.
Les raboteurs de parquet is an oil painting by French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. The canvas measures 102 by 146.5 centimetres. It was originally given by Caillebotte's family in 1894 to the Musée du Luxembourg, then transferred to the Musée du Louvre in 1929. In 1947, it was moved to the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, and in 1986, it was transferred again to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it is currently displayed.
The Musée Courbet or Courbet Museum is a museum dedicated to the French painter Gustave Courbet. It is located in Ornans in the Doubs-Franche-Comté area of France.
Realism was an artistic movement that emerged in France in the 1840s, around the 1848 Revolution. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the early 19th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and the exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. Instead, it sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. The movement aimed to focus on unidealized subjects and events that were previously rejected in art work. Realist works depicted people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes brought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. Realism was primarily concerned with how things appeared to the eye, rather than containing ideal representations of the world. The popularity of such "realistic" works grew with the introduction of photography—a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce representations which look objectively real.
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Guillemet was a French renowned landscape painter and longtime Jury member of the Salon des Artistes Francais. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.
The Wrestlers is a large 1853 painting by Gustave Courbet, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest]. It shows two men engaged in 'French wrestling', inspired by Greco-Roman wrestling. Documents reveal that it shows a match in the former hippodrome on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. His choice of such a huge canvas inspired Alexandre Falguière's 1875 The Wrestlers.
The Bathers is a painting by Gustave Courbet, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1853, where it caused a major scandal. It was unanimously attacked by art critics for the huge nude woman at its centre and the sketchy landscape background, both against official artistic canons. It was bought for 3000 francs by Courbet's future friend Alfred Bruyas, an art collector – this acquisition allowed the artist to become financially and artistically independent. It is signed and dated in the bottom right hand corner on a small rock. It has been in the musée Fabre in Montpellier since 1868.
The Oak at Flagey or The Vercingetorix Oak is an oil on canvas landscape painting by Gustave Courbet, created in 1864, measuring 89 by 110 cm. It shows an oak near the Courbet family farm in the village of Flagey, Doubs, a few kilometres from Ornans in Franche-Comté, named in relation to Vercingetorix. The oak was later struck by lightning and no longer survives. The painting is held at the Musée Courbet, in Paris.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe is an 1865–1866 oil on canvas painting by Claude Monet, produced in response to the 1863 work of the same title by Édouard Manet. It remained unfinished, but two large fragments are now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, whilst a smaller 1866 version is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Le Désespéré is an 1843-1845 oil on canvas self-portrait by Gustave Courbet, produced early during his stay in Paris. It is now in the private collection of the Conseil Investissement Art BNP Paribas but was displayed in the Musée d'Orsay's 2007 Courbet exhibition
The Source is a 1862 oil painting done by Gustave Courbet, a French artist. The painting shows a nude woman standing outside in nature, in a body of water.
Scandals in art occur when members of the public are shocked or offended by a work of art at the time of its first exhibition or publication,.