Nothing is Beautiful but the Ugly! Gustave Courbet According to His Detractors
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 4 min read
In mid-nineteenth-century France, the guardians of the French school were challenged by a rival school, that of Courbet, whose realism broke free from classical conventions to embrace, and even glorify, the ugliness of everyday life.
Champfleury defends him; traditional criticism fails to understand; caricature revels in it, and Courbet takes pride in it, even doubling down.
Courbet Gives the Public the Ugly, and on a Grand Scale
Between 1849 and 1855, four canvases wounded the good taste of the public and specialists: The Peasants of Flagey (2.05 x 2.75 m), The Stone Breakers (1.65 x 2.75 m), A Burial at Ornans (3.13 x 6.64 m), and The Bathers (2.27 x 1.93 m).
Had these paintings been smaller, they would have passed for genre painting in the Dutch vein of the Golden Age.
But by asserting himself through the size of history painting—monumental in the case of A Burial—Courbet exhibited human misery without restraint, without compassion, and without "falsism."
The Reversal of Classical Values
Official art continued to prefer the ideal body over anatomical deformities, even as its norms modernized. Let us return to Nicolas Boileau's principle of classical aesthetics:
“Nothing is beautiful but the true. The true alone is lovely.”
In the first half of the 19th century, this "true" referred to a metaphysical truth, to an idealised and unobservable beauty. Under the ironic pen of Théophile Gautier, horrified by Courbet's paintings, the principle then became:
“Nothing is beautiful but the ugly, the ugly alone is lovely.”
He continued by accusing the painter of indulging in a new kind of mannerism that henceforth served not grace, but disgrace.
Champfleury, a partisan of the unfiltered truth represented by Courbet, took offense at this distortion of Boileau's words; why should Courbet be thus condemned, he who followed in the footsteps of a Victor Hugo? The text, initially written in the form of a letter to George Sand, would become what is known as the Realist Manifesto, published in 1855.
The ugliness reproached by Gautier or Charles Perrier was a reproduction of reality devoid of nobility, a representation of the crippled and the destitute with the objective coldness of a photographic plate—monstrous, abject, and without compassion.
Not that they defended the painting of exclusively noble subjects, but they felt that Courbet should at least have the decency to treat them with panache, fire, or dignity, as the Spaniards, the Flemish, or a Delacroix had done before him.
The caricatures sketched by Cham or Daumier testify to this general stupefaction. Courbet's paintings displayed, on a grand scale, stinking monstrosities and deformed gnomes.
To this was added a certain lack of understanding: why also mistreat the working classes and the marginalised when one claims to be politically on the left? Why not provide a sympathetic representation of them?
The Political Function of the Ugly: Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the political friend, appreciated this unfavourable treatment because it was educational. Let us take the case of The Bathers. Their frankly overflowing fat taught the spectator that the indolence of the bourgeois woman was ugly and repulsive. Conversely, Courbet's The Spinner, a peasant girl peacefully asleep after her labor, reflected Proudhon's social and political ideal.
Visual Satire and Provocation: The Art of the Shock
Far from being intimidated by this media onslaught, the painter relished it and pushed provocation to a climax.
He announced the painting of a Franche-Comté funeral meal scene, organised around the remains of a young girl—a project often associated with The Dressing of the Dead Girl, an unfinished canvas.
It was intended to be a dressing of the deceased, with a mirror facing her, which would confirm that no breath emanated from her lungs. Courbet intended to render the greenish hues of a putrefying body; he would paint a stench and exulted in it!
He would be accused of having thus created the "school of the ugly" (Count Horace de Viel-Castel in 1853), an expression that would become a staple of critical vocabulary.
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