A groundbreaking insight into Gustave Courbet and his bold experiments in landscape painting
Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism.
Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native Franche-Comté to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world. The Courbet he discovers is not the celebrated history painter of provincial life, but a committed landscapist whose view of nature aligns him with contemporary developments in geology, history, linguistics, and literature.
Paul Galvez is research associate at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, University of Texas.
“A brilliant and provocative tour-de-force that places these works on fertile new ground, with important consequences for following generations.”—James H. Rubin, author of Why Monet Matters: Meanings Among the Lily Pads
“Highly original, engaging, and eloquent, Courbet’s Landscapes radically recasts our understanding of the painter of Ornans, offering a fresh insight into how one painted in nineteenth-century France.” – Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Harvard University
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