The Studio of the Painter: a Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life

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Gustave Courbet, The Studio, 1855
Proud of his accomplishments and his own point of view, Courbet believed "the people who want to judge [The Studio] will have their work cut out for them."

In 1855, France had their first Universal Exposition to show off all of the accomplishments that took place under Napoleon III. Because the art exhibition, the Salon of 1854, got canceled, there would be a grand art exposition to compensate. While pieces by Ingres and Delacroix were front and center, Courbet failed to make the cut. Napoleon believed Courbet was not "in any way a part of [Napoleon's] government; and that [Courbet] was too a government," (written in a letter from Courbet to Bruyas re-telling the story of Courbet's luncheon with the Comte de Nieuwerkerke) defying the law.

In attempt to gain exposure in the Exposition alongside his fellow painters, he painted the large 11 x 20 ft. The Studio of the Painter: a Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic Life (The Studio) in just six months. The Studio, however, got rejected, and instead, Courbet organized a private exhibition, the "Pavilion of Realism," on the opposite side of the road from the entrance of the Exposition, charging only ten sous. Among the low amounts of attendees and critics, Delacroix came to admire, and later wrote in his diary, "I think all these machines are very depressing...Afterwards I went to the Courbet exhibition...and discovered a masterpiece in the picture they rejected."

The Studio separates two different groups of people. On the right, "his various artistic and bohemian friends," in his Parisian life, such as Baudelaire, Champfleury, and Bruyas. And on the left resides people from his home life in Ornans such as "the people, misery, poverty, wealth, the exploited and the exploiters, [and] the people who live off death." Some of these people include Louis Napoleon, the Minister of State Echille Fould, Lazare Carnot, some European Revolutionaries such as Garibaldi, Kassuth and Kosciuszko, and a Jew. In the middle of the painting, Courbet paints in his studio with the admiring youth and a nude model.

Against most male painters of the time and possibly "an instance of modernism," the woman does not represent "a muse," but a mere model, not to be heightened to any sexual fantasy such as Ingres.

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