The Ogre of Ornans: Courbet’s War on Angels, Poets, and Sobriety
- Art d'Histoire
- Feb 18
- 5 min read
Gustave Courbet was not a man of half-measures. Physically imposing and aesthetically uncompromising, he strode through the nineteenth-century art world with the subtlety of a cannonball. He rejected the idealism of the Romantics and the polish of the Academics, replacing them with a more brutal, material truth. His philosophy was simple: he would only paint what he could see. This dogma of "Realism" alienated his friends, scandalised the Imperial court, and led him into a lifestyle of excess that blurred the lines between artistic manifesto and self-destruction.
The Poet on the Mattress
In the vast composition of The Painter’s Studio, Courbet included his friend Charles Baudelaire, depicted reading intently on the right side of the canvas. However, this painted homage hid a crumbling relationship. The figure of the poet was actually copied from a portrait painted in 1848, creating an anachronism that dated back to their bohemian youth. During that period, the two men had lived in close quarters; Courbet had sometimes improvised a bed for the homeless poet in his studio using old clothes and sheets.
Despite this intimacy, their worldviews were incompatible. Courbet, ever the pragmatist, told Baudelaire that writing poetry was "dishonest" and a pretension to aristocracy. The friction was exacerbated by Baudelaire’s request to remove his mistress, Jeanne Duval, from the Studio canvas. Courbet obliged, painting over her, but the friendship could not be salvaged. Baudelaire eventually came to detest the painter, leaving Courbet to wonder years later how much of their bond still held true.
The Blackboard of Hallucinations
One of the amusing points of contention between the two men was Baudelaire’s drug use. The poet had begun consuming hashish in the form of a green jam called dawamesk, a mixture of fatty extracts, sugar, and spices. While Baudelaire sought "magical faded finery" in these trips, Courbet viewed them with the cold eye of a scientist. He despised the hashish and opium abuse that took his friend away from reality, yet he could not resist documenting it, as the poet had asked.
On one occasion, after a drunken evening, Courbet decided to transcribe Baudelaire’s drug-induced "ramblings" onto a large blackboard. He recorded the obscure and incoherent sentences of the stupefied bohemian as they fell. When Baudelaire awoke, he was terrified to find the "colossal figure" of Courbet standing over him with a piece of chalk, staring with fiery eyes. For Courbet, the hallucinations were not a gateway to heaven but a descent into a state where reasoning was merely a "wreck," confirming his belief that the artist must remain grounded in the tangible world.
The Empress and the Percheron
Courbet’s refusal to idealise the human form brought him into direct conflict with the highest powers in France. At the Salon of 1853, he exhibited The Bathers, a painting of such fleshy robustness that it provoked a scandal. It is said that Napoleon III, offended by the sight, struck the canvas with his riding crop. Courbet, with characteristic bravado, later remarked that had he known, he would have used a thinner canvas so the Emperor would have torn it, allowing him to sue.
The Empress Eugénie was no less shocked. Fresh from viewing Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, she stopped in front of Courbet’s nude and asked if the woman was a Percheron, comparing the figure’s heavy haunches to those of a draft horse. This comparison between Courbet’s women and "whipped mares" became a staple of criticism, highlighting the gap between courtly taste and Courbet’s "gross" realism.
Angels with Behinds
Courbet’s disdain for the invisible extended to religious art. He famously feuded with the concept of angels, mocking the works of Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet. When viewing Manet’s Christ with Angels, Courbet asked sarcastically if Manet had ever seen an angel to know if they had buttocks, noting that the wings Manet gave them were too small to carry such weight.
This mockery is rooted in the dictum: Not seen, not painted. He advised young artists to paint their fathers rather than Christ, reasoning that at least they had seen their fathers. When asked why he never painted angels, he replied simply: "Make me a man, and we'll see." For Courbet, a girl with seagulls on a beach in Trouville was the only "winged blonde head" that a realist could honestly depict.
A Cannon Fired into the Void
By 1863, Courbet’s provocative nature had alienated even his staunchest ally, the writer Champfleury. The breaking point was The Return of the Conference, an anti-clerical painting depicting drunken priests. Champfleury, in a letter to Max Buchon, described the work as a "bad cannon" that fired into the void. He criticised the painting for being weak in execution and political rather than artistic, lamenting that Courbet had "a weak soul in a strong body."
Champfleury felt that Courbet was surrounded by sycophants who murdered him with compliments, anchoring him in his "robust self-esteem." The writer concluded that their friendship was over, suggesting that Courbet needed five or six years of solitude to recover his talent. Courbet, stung by the criticism, accused Champfleury of being "sold to the government," sealing the rift between the theorist of Realism and its practitioner.
The King of Beer
Courbet’s appetite for life was as gargantuan as his ego, particularly when it came to alcohol. He was a fixture at the Brasserie Andler, where he held court and drank immense quantities of beer. During a trip to Munich in 1869, he participated in a beer-drinking competition. By the fourth day, he was the only contestant left, drinking from a ten-litre barrel while his competitors dropped out.
However, these beer abuses came at a price.
Alexandre Dumas fils described Courbet as a "noisy and hairy pumpkin" grown from a mixture of wine, beer, and corrosive mucus. In his final years, suffering from dropsy, Courbet was forbidden from drinking beer. He switched to the white wines of the region and old Pommard, deluding himself that the change would improve his liver, even as his body began to fail him, a tragic end for the man who had tried to swallow the world whole.
This blog is based on the anthologies of primary sources edited by Art d'Histoire Academy. The complete academic references are available in the following publication:
There are four freely available videos on the Art d'Histoire website dedicated to Courbet:
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