Читать книгу Gustave Courbet - Georges Riat - Страница 7

At the beginning of the summer, Courbet went to stay in Louveciennes for two months, at the home of Francis Wey. As he put it himself, he needed to “fatten up”. According to the Mémoires inédits, he was skinnier and paler than ever, but once in the country he soon recovered his appetite. He became the life of the party at meals with his unexpected and original jokes, his high spirits and affability attracting neighbours and friends, who were anxious to be invited and curious to see and hear him, although they were likewise sure that at “every conversation they would be called idiots in a most congenial way.”

In Louveciennes, he wasted no time, painting on everything, even cigar boxes, most often with a palette knife. The artist did not limit himself to scenes of Louveciennes and the environs. One morning he painted Madame Wey, who was then convalescing after a long illness, sitting in front of a wooded hillside in a misty atmosphere. “This sort of miniature, painted broadly, is the lone example in his work of this style and manner.” The painter stayed in this charming retreat for two months, then was off to Ornans.

His father had had a studio built for him, “of respectable dimensions, but the window was too small, and in the wrong position”. At once, “I had one three times as large put in; now it is as bright in there as in the street.” On the 26th of November, he explained the chance encounter that had led him to paint The Stone Breakers; “I had taken our carriage; I was going to the castle of Saint-Denis, near Maizières. I stopped to watch two men breaking up stone on the road. One rarely sees such an absolute expression of wretchedness.” He at once thought that this could be the subject of an interesting painting. He arranged for them to come to his studio the next day, and the canvas was quickly finished. It is of the same dimensions as the After Dinner at Ornans. There is an old man in his seventies on the right, bent over his work. His sledgehammer is raised in the air, his flesh darkened by the sun, his head shaded by a straw hat. His trousers of rough cloth have patches, and through the cracks in his wooden shoes his stockings can be seen; stockings that were once blue, and now have holes at the heels. On the left is a young man with dust in his hair and greyish-brown skin. His shirt, filthy and in tatters, leaves parts of his back and arms exposed; a leather strap holds up what is left of his trousers, and his mud-coated leather shoes gape pathetically in several places. The old man is on his knees; the young man is behind him, standing, carrying a basket of crushed rock. Alas! In such a life, thus does one begin, thus does one end! Here and there their paraphernalia are scattered; a basket, a staff, a hoe, a soup pot and so on. They work in full sun, in the open countryside, beside a ditch that runs along a road. The landscape nearly fills the painting. “Poor folks!” he said in a letter to Wey, “I tried to epitomise their life in the corner of this frame; isn’t it true that they never see more than a little slice of the sky!” The good people of Ornans flocked to his studio to admire the The Stone Breakers as soon as they could, and pronounced that he would never produce a truer painting, even if he did a hundred. Proudhon even wrote that the locals wanted to buy it and put it over the high altar of their church.

It was later said that the The Stone Breakers was the first socialist work by the painter. However, this letter to Francis Wey, and another to Champfleury couched in nearly identical terms, show that he was initially moved only by pity for the dispossessed, and not at all by the idea of stinging social protest. His ambitions were elsewhere towards the end of 1849; he was still more concerned with art than politics, and art was what he wanted to reform. He believed that the painting he then had underway, called A Burial at Ornans, would contribute greatly to that cause.

As he told Champfleury, all the Ornans folk were eager to be part of A Burial at Ornans. Being obliged to choose his characters, he was afraid of making lots of enemies:

“I’ve already done studies of the mayor, who weighs 400, the parish priest, the justice of the peace, the cross bearer, the notary, Marlet, the assistant mayor, my friends, my father, the choirboys, the grave digger, two old revolutionaries from ‘93 with their uniforms of that time, a dog, the dead man and his pallbearers, the beadles, my sisters, other women too, and so on. I was planning to skip the two parish cantors, but there was no way around it. People came to warn me that they were offended, that they were the only ones from the church that I hadn’t drawn. They were complaining vociferously, saying that they had never done me any harm, and that they didn’t deserve such an affront. You have to be mad to work under the conditions I’m in; it’s like working with blinkers on. I have no room to stand back and see the whole. Will I never have a space to work as I should? Anyway, I am about to finish fifty subjects, life-sized, with landscape and sky as the background, on a canvas twenty feet long by ten high.”

When you look at it closely, A Burial at Ornans is less a genre scene than a group of portraits. The idea was new, or at least a renewal of the guild paintings of Van der Helst, Franz Hals and Rembrandt. All these faces are recognisable.

They are arranged around an open grave, below the Roche Founèche that Courbet so loved, with the Roche du Mont and the Roche du Château in the background, under a sickly white sky. On the left is the priest, Monsieur Bonnet, bald-headed, reading the prayers for the dead and wearing a black cape trimmed in silver. Behind him stands the cross bearer, the wine maker Colart; then Cauchi, the sacristan, likewise in a white surplice, and black biretta, like the kind they wore in those days, triangular, very tall and topped with a pompon. The two choirboys are next, one paying attention, the other watching one of the pallbearers. In the left-hand corner, four men carry the coffin, which is draped in a black and white cloth decorated with crossbones. They each hold the handles of the stretcher with one hand, with the other a strip of cloth, which goes around their shoulders and passes under the coffin. On their heads are wide-brimmed hats, which the hatter Alphonse Cuenot rented out for funerals. They avert their heads in a way that is very realistic, given that country burials were usually conducted fairly late, the body often beginning to putrefy by then. On the side toward the rocks, the pallbearers are, on the right, Alphonse Bon, and, on the left, Alphonse Promayet. On the other side are Etienne Nodier and the elder Crevot. Behind them, touching the frame, is the old wine maker Oudot, grandfather of the artist, and, above Alphonse Bon’s hat can be seen, in profile, the head of the poet Max Buchon.

The central group can be divided in two. On the left is old Cassard the gravedigger in shirtsleeves, kneeling on his smock. Behind, the two beadles, in red choir robes with black velvet yokes, wear ribbed red caps. This dress has not changed, and its bright colour and unique shape can still be seen in Ornans today. The beadle on the right is the wine grower J.-B. Muselier, and the one on the left, with the extraordinary nose, the cobbler Pierre Clément. Between him and the priest is Promayet, the organist and father of Alphonse, wearing a white surplice and a black cap.

23. Mère Grégoire, 1855/1857–1859.

Oil on canvas, 129 × 97.5 cm.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

24. Peasant Girl with a Scarf, c. 1848.

Oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm.

Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena.

25. Portrait of Zélie Courbet, 1853.

Oil on canvas, 55 × 46 cm.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy.

26. Grandmother Salvan’s Tales, 1847.

Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm.

Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis.

27. Portrait of a Young Girl from Ornans, 1842.

Oil on canvas, 71 × 57 cm.

Musée Gustave-Courbet, Ornans.

On the gravedigger’s right, standing upright in his black frock coat and holding his top hat appears Monsieur Proudhon, cousin of the philosopher, deputy justice of the peace. Behind is the mayor, Prosper Teste de Sagey, whose simple appearance contrasts with his neighbour’s. Near him is Bertin, wiping his face with his handkerchief, and above him Courbet’s father, in right profile. Beside him is Adolphe Marlet, a friend of the artist; then Sage, in a top hat and the deputy mayor, Tony Marlet the younger, who had studied law in Paris. Finally, near a magnificent pointer that has wandered into the cemetery, probably not unusual in a village during such ceremonies, are the two veterans of 1793, dressed the French style of breeches, white and blue stockings and pumps, decorated waistcoats, wide cravats and old-style bicorne hats. On the right is old Monsieur Secrétan, a wine maker, his hand outstretched, and on the left is old Monsieur Cardet, his arms crossed, looking thoughtful.

The women fill the right-hand portion of the painting, separated from the men, as in church. The artist’s mother is against the edge of the canvas, seen from the left in three-quarter view, wearing a black coiffe and holding the hand of a pretty girl, who is Teste’s daughter. Her own three daughters are behind the veterans of 1793; Juliette is on the left, a handkerchief over her mouth, in the centre is the exuberant Zoé, her face hidden in grief and on the right is the thoughtful Zélie. The woman in the hooded cape is “the” Joséphine Bocquin, and Promayet’s mother, Célestine Garmont, is also there, her bonnet falling in large folds. Françoise, the wife of Alexandre the hunchback, is next, then Félicité Bon, wife of Gagey the stone breaker, the fourth in the first row, by some rocks.

A drawing, which is now in the museum of Besançon, shows the first conception of A Burial at Ornans, which is definitely not as satisfactory as the final version. Courbet had first seen the cortège as moving towards the grave, the priest, the pallbearers and the gravedigger positioned on the left-hand side of the painting. The final arrangement of the cortège, having reached its destination, is better suited for producing the effect desired by the artist. He wanted to show a country funeral, at the moment of the final separation, viewed by the men with calm or scepticism, in most cases, and more melodramatically by the women; the priest and the gravedigger completely detached and unmoved.

As enormous as the work required for this had been, Courbet’s energy was still not exhausted. In addition to the landscapes around the ruins of the Saint-Denis tower, in Scey-en-Varais, that he would paint for relaxation, he began a third very large composition, Peasants of Flagey returning from the Fair, also known as Return from the Fair.

This burst of activity took up the winter of 1849–1850. Courbet inquired whether the Salon would be held in the month of May, in which case he was afraid that he wouldn’t have time to finish everything for the exhibition. This was a needless concern since, owning to political events (conflict between the Legislative Assembly and the prince-president, Louis Napoleon, with a gradual build-up to the coup d’Etat) the Salon was put off until the 30th of December 1850.

At the same time, Courbet complained of not hearing from his friend Wey, and he thought the reason was that he had not sent his condolences at the death of Wey’s father. Thus he decided to apologise in a most peculiar way. He stated that did not grieve for the deceased because he was convinced that one grieved only for selfish reasons. Additionally, one man’s life was “not directly useful to another’s” and there are better ways to use one’s time than to grieve for the departed. Sorrow was a good thing, but it had to be shared in person, never by letter and if it weren’t that he was afraid of tiring him, he would write him “four pages” of it. His abstention was not an oversight and it should be taken for what it was, and not for what it was supposed to be. This instance is very telling about Courbet psychologically; here we see the troublesome tendency of his mind to philosophise about feelings and ideas, when in fact it was better able to grasp daily situations. The painter took himself for a philosopher, just as he did a musician. That would be the cause of all his difficulties, in art as in politics. He had been born a marvellous instinctive artist; instinctive he should have remained.

Another letter to Wey revealed a new preoccupation; “In our civilised society, I must lead the life of a savage; I must free myself even from governments. My sympathies lie with the people; I must go to them directly, I must draw my wisdom from them, and they must give me life. For that reason, I have just embarked on the grand, independent and vagabond life of the bohemian.”

Therefore, he set up two exhibitions of his works, in Besançon and Dijon, and decided that they would have an entrance fee. In Besançon, the mayor made the concert hall in the central market pavilion available to Courbet for free. More than two hundred and fifty people, “presenting 50 centimes from their pockets, their very own pockets”, came to see the works. It was a different story in Dijon, in late July. With soldiers camped everywhere, the mayor had no available space and Courbet had to rent a room in a cafe building. In addition, the city was divided into two clearly opposing camps, the Reds, republicans, and the Whites, conservatives, and the cafe in question was run by a Red, and patronised exclusively by persons of his persuasion. Not a single White came to see the exhibition, and the republicans alone, whether because their purses were flat or because art was of little interest to them, could not make up for this. Courbet, their partisan, had in fact reversed his earlier decision to require an entry fee, and since he was renting the room at ten francs a day, he quickly packed up “without covering his expenses” and went back to Paris.

No sooner had he arrived than artists “of all sorts” and “society people also” came to see his new works. Everyone agreed that they would make a huge impression at the next Salon. “Their fame is all over Paris; wherever I go, everyone talks about them.”