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The Painter’s Studio

Artist: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
Date: 1854–1855
Dimensions: 361 x 598 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas
Location: Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

The Painter’s Studio, subtitled “A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life”, is a vast self-portrait of Courbet at work, surrounded by the people who shaped his world. Rejected by the jury of the 1855 World’s Fair, it was shown in his own private exhibition hall.

A closer look

At the centre, Courbet paints a landscape of his native region, watched by a nude model and a small boy. On the right stand his friends and supporters, including the poet Baudelaire reading and the collector Alfred Bruyas. On the left are figures from the wider society: a hunter, a priest, a merchant, a poor woman nursing a baby. The meaning of the whole remains debated, but it clearly places the realist painter at the centre of the life of his time.

History of the painting

Courbet never sold the enormous canvas. After his death it remained with his family and passed through private hands, rolled up for long periods. In 1920 the Louvre acquired it with the help of a public subscription organised by the Friends of the Louvre, as many supporters contributed to keep this manifesto of Realism in France. It moved to the Musée d'Orsay in 1986, and a long restoration completed in 2016, partly carried out in view of visitors, revealed details hidden under darkened varnish.

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