Atelier du peintre

Gustave Courbet gave this enormous 1855 canvas a title almost as big as the painting itself: "The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life." At the heart of it sits Courbet, brush in hand, working on a landscape while a nude model watches over his shoulder and a curious young boy peers at the canvas. The room splits into two worlds. On the left crowd the everyday folk of France, hunters, laborers, and the poor. On the right stand his friends and champions, among them the poet Charles Baudelaire, tucked into the far corner with a book. Taken together, the scene works like a personal map of everyone and everything that shaped the artist.

Courbet led the Realism movement, which ditched myths and history paintings in favor of ordinary life and real people. That is what makes the phrase "real allegory" so strange, since it seems to argue with itself. The story behind the painting is just as bold as the picture. When the official Paris Exhibition of 1855 turned the work away, Courbet refused to sulk. He rented his own space nearby, hung his rejected paintings, and charged people to come see them, a stunt that gave later artists ideas about controlling their own careers. The painting now lives at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where its dark, smoky tones and packed crowd of figures still leave visitors guessing who everyone is and what Courbet really meant by it all.