![]() His figures were not men and women deprived of personality and idealised into a type, posed in positions that will decorate the canvas. They depicted men and women as they really are and realistically doing the business in which they are engaged. Then followed the Funeral at Ornans, which the critics violently assailed: “A masquerade funeral, six metres long, in which there is more to laugh at than to weep over.” Indeed, the real offence of Courbet’s pictures was that they represented live flesh and blood. At first his pictures were not sufficiently distinctive to arouse any opposition, and were admitted to the Salon. Already in his country home he had had a little instruction in painting, and preferred to study the masterpieces of the Louvre. He went to Paris to study art, yet he did not attach himself to the studio of any of the prominent masters. In both directions his spirit of revolt manifested itself. ![]() He was by nature a revolutionary, a man born to oppose existing order and to assert his independence he had that quality of bluster and brutality which makes the revolutionary count in art as well as in politics. Ornans, Courbet’s birthplace, is near the beautiful valley of the Doubs River, and it was here as a boy, and later as a man, that he absorbed the love of landscape. ![]()
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