Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement and made a career out of provoking the art establishment. Born in 1819 in the French countryside, he insisted on painting ordinary life at full scale, treating stone breakers and village funerals with the same seriousness usually reserved for kings and gods. Critics were outraged that he made common people the heroes of enormous canvases.

He was as much a public showman and political radical as a painter, once setting up his own tent to show rejected work outside an official exhibition. His blunt, physical way of laying on paint and his refusal to prettify his subjects opened the door for the Impressionists who came after. His politics eventually landed him in trouble, and he died in exile in Switzerland in 1877.