Artists

Gustave Courbet Art Prints

Gustave Courbet (French, 1819–1877)

6 museum-quality prints of works by Gustave Courbet, each made to order on archival paper and shipped to your wall.

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) led the Realist movement in French painting, insisting on depicting only what he could see. His A Burial at Ornans scandalized the Salon of 1850–51 by rendering ordinary townspeople at the scale reserved for history painting, and when the 1855 Exposition Universelle rejected The Painter’s Studio, he mounted his own Pavilion of Realism nearby. Mère Grégoire (1855), his portrait of a tavern keeper, belongs to this defiant decade.

Courbet remained attached throughout his life to his native Franche-Comté, whose limestone gorges and dark streams he painted repeatedly — the Puits-Noir near Ornans, seen in The Valley of Les Puits-Noir (1868), became one of his most sustained motifs, alongside cliffs like The Rock of Hautepierre. Imprisoned in 1871 for his role in the Paris Commune, he spent his final years in Swiss exile, where late works such as An Alpine Scene (1874) were painted; he died at La Tour-de-Peilz in 1877.