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ART “4” “2”-DAY 31 December

DEATH: 1877 COURBET

BIRTHS: 1753 VAN STRY — 1842 BOLDINI — 1869 MATISSE

^ Born on 31 December 1753: Abraham van Stry I, Dutch artist who died on 07 March 1826.
— Abraham van Stry (1753-1826) was a painter of oils and watercolors born in Dordrecht. A versaitile painter, van Stry first made still life scenes of flowers and fruit. Later, obliged to assist his father, Leendert van Stry, he began to make history paintings and landscapes. Van Stry painted interiors and genre scenes in the style of Gabriel Metsu and Pieter de Hooch, and his landscapes reveal a close study of Cuyp. Van Stry also painted illusionistic grisaille imitations of marble reliefs, a popular decor in the Netherlands since the Renaissance. These were known as "witjes" ("wit" or white) after Jacob de Wit (1695-1754), who gained international renown in this style. In 1774 Abraham van Stry founded the society "Pictura" of Dordrecht. Beginning in 1818 he was a member of the Antwerp Academy. His works earned several prizes in Paris and London.
— Young Sweethearts (36x46cm) _ This is a genre scene of the type popular in eighteenth-century Holland. Middle-class patrons delighted in their status and possessions, and enjoyed painted representations of this kind

^ Born on 31 December 1842: Giovanni Boldini, Italian painter who died on 12 January 1931.
— Fils d'un artiste de Ferrare spécialisé dans la peinture religieuse, Boldini apprit son art à l'Académie de Florence et fit la connaissance au café Michelangelo du groupe des Macchiaioli, qui aiguisèrent son sens de la touche libre et des rapports colorés intenses. Le choix facile des sujets, une facture brillante et minutieuse, une touche onctueuse, ont concouru au vif succès qu'il connut au cours de ses séjours à Londres et à Paris (1869 - 1871), consacrant sa vocation mondaine.
Fixé définitivement à Paris en 1872, il se mêla au cercle des peintres qui fréquentaient le Salon. Il commença alors la célèbre série de ses portraits parisiens. Son coup de pinceau plus libre et plus nerveux annonce son style définitif, cette manière fiévreuse et elliptique qui s'épanouira pleinement vers 1886, au moment où il devient une célébrité du monde parisien, avec ses amis le peintre Helleu et le dessinateur Sem. Au cours des décennies suivantes, les plus prestigieuses personnalités du Paris de la fin du siècle posèrent devant lui.
— The Misses Muriel and Consuelo Vanderbilt
— Mrs. Graham Fair Vanderbilt — Mrs. Whitney Warren, Sr (1908)
— Madame X (1907) — Café Scene (1887)
— Portrait Study of a Woman — Portrait of Whistler Asleep (1897)
— Lady Colin Campbell (1897) — Count Robert de Montesquieu (1897)
— Parigi di Notte — Reclining Nude (55x74cm) — Madame Charles Max
— Count Robert de Montesquiou — Henri Rochefort — Cecilia de Madrazo Fortuny (115x69cm)

^ Died on 31 December 1877: Jean-Désiré-Gustave Courbet, leading French realist painter, also a writer, born on 10 June 1819.
— Courbet’s glory is based essentially on his works of the late 1840s and early 1850s depicting peasants and labourers, which were motivated by strong political views and formed a paradigm of Realism. From the mid-1850s into the 1860s he applied the same style and spirit to less overtly political subjects, concentrating on landscapes and hunting and still-life subjects. Social commitment, including a violent anticlericalism, re-emerged in various works of the 1860s and continued until his brief imprisonment after the Commune of 1871. From 1873 he lived in exile in Switzerland where he employed mediocre artists, but also realized a couple of outstanding pictures with an extremely fresh and free handling. The image Courbet presented of himself in his paintings and writings has persisted, making him an artist who is assessed as much by his personality as by his work. This feature and also his hostility to the academic system, state patronage and the notion of aesthetic ideals have made him highly influential in the development of modernism.
— The son of a family of well off landowners from the west of France, Courbet cultivated a rough ‘peasant painter’ image throughout his life. He claimed to be largely self-taught and insisted that art should take as its subject the lives of ordinary people. In 1855 he held an exhibition of his own work entitled ‘Realism’ which epitomised his style and interests. Imprisoned for his role in the destruction of the great column in the Place Vendôme during the Paris Commune in 1871, he fled to Switzerland in 1873 and died there four years later.
— Alexandre Dumas the Younger disliked Courbet so much that he once called him a ‘sonorous and hairy pumpkin’.
— In 1860 Courbet opened a short-lived studio school. It was not a great success, he provided horses and bulls as models and refused to teach so as not to compromise anyone’s individuality.
— Courbet was an influential and prolific French painter, who, with his compatriots Honore Daumier and Jean Francois Millet, founded the mid-19th-century art movement called realism.
      Courbet, a farmer's son, was born in Ornans. He went to Paris about 1840, ostensibly to study law; instead, he taught himself to paint by copying masterpieces in the Louvre, Paris. In 1850 he exhibited The Stone Breakers (1849), a blunt, forthright depiction of laborers repairing a road. In it, Courbet deliberately flouted the precepts of the romantics—champions of emotionally charged exoticism—and of the powerful academics—guardians of the moralizing Beaux-Arts traditions. He further outraged them with his enormous Burial at Ornans (1850), in which a frieze of poorly clad peasants surrounds a yawning grave. Courbet compounded his defiance of convention in another huge painting, The Artist's Studio (1855), which he subtitled A True Allegory Concerning Seven Years of My Artistic Life. In it, Courbet sits painting a landscape center stage, attended by a small boy, a dog, and a voluptuous female nude; at left a listless, bored group studiously ignores him; at right a lively, spirited crowd of his friends admires his work. At the same time he issued a provocative manifesto detailing his social realist credo of art and life. By this time he enjoyed widespread popularity.
      By then Courbet's distinctive painting style was fully developed, marked by technical mastery, a bold and limited palette, compositional simplicity, strong and even harshly modeled figures (as in his nudes), and heavy impasto—thick layers of paint—often applied with a palette knife (particularly evident in his landscape and marine paintings).
      As radical in politics as he was in painting, Courbet was placed in charge of all art museums under the revolutionary 1871 Commune of Paris and saved the city's collections from looting mobs. Following the fall of the Commune, however, Courbet was accused of allowing the destruction of Napoléon's triumphal column in the Place Vendôme; he was imprisoned and condemned to pay for its reconstruction. In 1873 he fled to Vevey, Switzerland, where he continued to paint until his death.
^
— Courbet was born in Ornans, a small town in the Jura region of eastern France. Situated on the Swiss border, this mountainous area is rich with forests and pasture lands, while Ornans itself nestles in the rocky valley of the River Loue.
     Courbet's family had lived in the area for generations. His father, Regis, owned a house in Ornans and a farm and vineyards in nearby Flagey. The family's ambivalent social position, with peasant origins but a new bourgeois identity, made Courbet particularly aware of the class divisions of rural France, and was central to his personal and artistic development. He also fell heir to a deep-rooted affection for the local countryside, which was to figure so largely in his art.
     Courbet's art training began at the age of 14, with lessons from "Père" Baud, a former student of the Neo-Classical painter Baron Gros. His parents were hoping that Gustave would study law when he moved to the nearby university town of Besanconin 1837, but he swiftly enrolled at the Academy, taking life classes under M. Flajoulot, another exponent of Classicism.
     Two years later, Courbet left Besancon for Paris, which in the mid 19th century had become the European center not only for art, but also for radicals and political activists of all kinds. A tall and strikingly handsome young man, the 20-year-old artist was supremely self-confident and gregarious, but his time in Paris started quietly enough. He began studying at the studio of a now obscure painter, M. Steuben, copied widely from the pictures in the Louvre and channeled his energies into seeking success at the Salon.
     Courbet's early attempts at recognition were none too successful. Between 1841 and 1847, only three of the 25 works he submitted were passed by the selection committee. And for the first 10 years he sold almost nothing, remaining almost entirely dependent on his family sending him money. During this period he also met Virginia Binet, about whom little is known except that she became his mistress and bore him a son in 1847.

     One of the works Courbet exhibited at the Salon caught the eye of a Dutch dealer, who invited him to Holland and commissioned a portrait. In addition, he had the support of the new friends he had made in Paris. In January 1848 he wrote enthusiastically to his parents that he was very close to making a breakthrough. Influential people, he assured them, were impressed by his work and were forming a new school, with him at the head.
     Courbet's Realist friends came from the circle which gathered at the Brasserie Andler (or the "Temple of Realism" as it was soon to be nicknamed). Among them were the poet Charles Baudelaire, Pierre Proudhon, and the anarchist; Jules Champfleury, the Realist author and critic; and his cousin and childhood friend Max Buchon.
     It was at the Brasserie that the term "Realism" was first coined to describe not only a style of art and literature which presented life as it was, but also a philosophy committed to contemporary social issues. The Brasserie Andler was just down the road from Courbet's studio, and he was often to be seen in the crowed cafe. His larger-than-life personality soon made him the center of the animated discussions which went on there nightly. He preserved his provincial Jura accent and smoked old-fashioned pipes; he was a great eater, a great drinker and above all a great talker. But he had adopted his role of semi-literate peasant for a reason - both to distance himself from the bourgeois world of Paris and to gain acceptance in avant-garde society. It also concealed an inner loneliness. He later wrote: "Behind this laughing mask of mine which you know, I conceal grief and bitterness, and a sadness which clings to my heart like a vampire. In the society in which we live, it doesn't take much to reach the void".
     In February 1848 that society was violently shaken, when rioting broke out on the streets of Paris. Louis Philippe abdicated and a provisional Republican government took control. Courbet sided with the popular insurrection, although he took little part in the fighting. In the uneasy political atmosphere, the Salon still opened, but this time without a selection committee. Courbet, who had suffered so many rejections in the past, now had ten works displayed.
^     Although the Second Republic survived for less than four years until Louis-Napoléon's coup d'état, Courbet's name was made. His Salon entries of 1848 were greeted enthusiastically by the critics and the following year his large painting After Dinner at Ornans won a gold medal and was purchased by the government. The medal was particularly important, since it exempted Courbet from the selection procedure at future Salons.
      The timing of this privilege was most fortuitous, as the storm of protest against the Realist movement was about to break. Probably on the advice of Champfleury, Courbet had been steadily abandoning his early Romantic subject-matter in favor of scenes of his beloved Ornans - which he visited regularly - containing portraits of his family, friends and neighbors. The most striking example of this was Burial at Ornans which went on show at the 1850-1851 Salon. Courbet had embarked on this huge painting in the summer of 1849, with virtually everyone in the district clamoring to be included. The result was a vast, frieze-like composition, designed to catch the eye. The critics hated it. It was too big; the figures were too ugly; the beadles looked drunk; it was too individual. From now on every picture Courbet exhibited provoked a furor.
      Not all the hostility which Courbet aroused can be attributed to purely artistic factors, however. In the aftermath of the Revolution, pictures of unidealized and uncompromising peasants, portrayed on a heroic scale, must have seemed deeply threatening to the new regime and its supporters. These fears were increased by friends such as Proudhon, who interpreted the works as political statements in a way that the artist had probably never intended.
      Courbet did not bother to deny such claims. He was rarely averse to provoking those in authority and took great pleasure in the vicarious radicalism of his reputation. So in 1853, when the government offered him an olive branch, Courbet was swift to rebuff it. This attempt at appeasement came when the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the Director of Fine Arts, proposed to Courbet that he should produce a major painting for the forthcoming World Exhibition, provided only that he submit a sketch in advance. Courbet rejected the overture indignantly, as a breach of his intellectual liberty. Needless to say, three of his most significant contributions to the exhibition were eventually rejected. The artist was disappointed, but not disheartened. And in 1855, in an unprecedented show of artistic independence, he staged his own one-man exhibition alongside the official displays.
      The show was advertised under the banner of REALISM and contained a representative selection of Courbet's work dating back to the early 1840's. The centerpiece was his most original and ambitious canvas, The Painter's Studio - a monumental depiction of the artist's studio, peopled with a mixture of close friends and symbolic figures.

      This private exhibition marked a watershed in Courbet's life, separating him from many of his most formative influences. Proudhon had been jailed and Buchon exiled for their activities during the Revolution, while Champfleury gradually dissociated himself from his friend's socialist leanings. There were upheavals in Courbet's personal life, too. His longstanding mistress, Virginia Binet, left him in the early 1850s, taking their young son with her. Courbet was surprisingly philosophical about this, writing to a friend that his art was keeping him busy and that in any case a married man was a reactionary.
     Increasing recognition outside Paris made Courbet less reliant on success at the Salon and he traveled extensively after 1855. In Frankfurt, he was treated as a celebrity, with the local Academy placing a studio at his disposal. In Trouville, on the Normandy coast, he met up with James Whistler and plied a profitable trade in seascapes and portraits of the local beauties; in Etretat he painted with the youthful Monet. He exhibited in Germany, Holland, Belgium and England, and decorations were showered on him.
     Undoubtedly, part of the reason that Courbet traveled so widely during the late 1850s and 1860s was to enjoy such accolades, but it was also partly to distance himself from a government that he still believed was hostile to him. When he was finally offered the Légion d'Honneur in 1870, on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, it was already too late. Courbet declined the decoration grandly, as an example of state interference in art.
     The gesture was remembered when the government fell, and Courbet was elected chairman of the republican Arts Commission. The following year, he narrowly missed election to the National Assembly, but was accepted as a counselor, which in turn made him a member of the Commune. Tenure of these posts implicated Courbet in the destruction of the column in the Place Vendôme, a monument to Napoléon's victories, and when the Commune failed, he was arrested and condemned to six months' imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs.
^      Courbet began his sentence at Sainte-Pélagie prison in September 1871. But illness cut short his stay, and he soon was removed to a clinic at Neuilly. Misfortune dogged him: his son died in 1872, and throughout the following winter Courbet was plagued with rheumatism and liver problems. Worse was to follow. In May 1873, the new government ordered him to pay for the reconstruction of the Vendome Column. The cost of this - later confirmed at over 300'000 francs - was prohibitive, and Courbet was obliged to flee from France. He chose Switzerland, where he felt at home among the French-speaking community and the familiar Jura mountains. The exiled artist settled at La Tour de Peilz, where he remained in touch with French dissidents and - despite heavy drinking - was able to continue painting. He never gave up hope of returning to France, but the chance of a reprieve never came. Courbet contracted dropsy and died on the last day of 1877.

In a letter written to a friend in 1850, Gustave Courbet announced that "in our so very civilized society it is necessary for me to live the life of a savage. I must be free even of governments. The people have my sympathies, I must address myself to them directly." These words shed considerable light on Courbet's art — and not just because Courbet's subjects aren't always the predictable, socially acceptable ones. There's something direct and even savage (if by that we mean unconventional) in the way Courbet attacks the canvas: in the way he sponges or scrapes the paint, juxtaposes areas that are more or less realistically handled, and frames or arranges figures and objects in unexpected ways.
      The risk factor in Courbet's work is, aesthetically speaking, very high. And the high-wire excitement of all those risks being taken all at once was a part — a big part — of what held us in the Courbet retrospective that was at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this winter [written in 1989]. It was exciting to try to figure out how Courbet achieved some of his effects — how he worked the paint to get those textures of water or snow; how he orchestrated his colors to create those mysteriously beautiful flesh tones or those lowering gray-day-at-the-beach skies. And what pulled us deeper and deeper into the work was the extent to which, more times in paint than we would imagine, the gambles panned out, and the crazy handling, the odd perspectives, the idiosyncratic color combinations coalesced into masterpiece-level paintings. There were many, many points in the show where Courbet seemed to be telling us, "To hell with convention." Still, the Brooklyn retrospective was one of the most totally civilized art experiences that we've had in New York in a very long time. Courbet challenges — and defies — our expectations; but he does so in the name of preservation and continuation. The approach to painting is radical; but — in the sense that Courbet is trying to find new ways to attain the heights he recognizes in Rembrandt and Chardin — conservative, too.
      In Brooklyn Courbet's paintings were hung intelligently, in thematic groupings that extended their meanings. Despite regrettable absences, there was a sense that the works had been chosen in order to illuminate one another. There was no overkill-there was just enough to take in during a reasonably long visit. This was a show to put alongside the Chardin retrospective held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1979 and the Watteau retrospective held at the National Gallery in Washington in 1984. Taken together, these shows form a triumvirate that presents French easel painting in all its unbeatable glory. In French painting, paint is emotion, the manipulation of materials is the expression of feelings. Sitting on the bench in the last gallery of the Courbet retrospective, surrounded by the tragic Self-portrait at Sainte Hagie (c. 1872), in which Courbet shows himself in prison following his involvement with the Commune of 1871; by a host of nudes, including the famous study of lesbians, The Sleepers (1866); and by the still lifes of apples, which look back to Chardin and forward to Cézanne — surrounded by all of this a museum-goer felt happily overwhelmed, but also happily clear in the head.

      Because of the impossibility of obtaining the loan of certain major paintings that are in France, the Brooklyn show couldn't give a particularly clear picture of the days in the early 1850s when Courbet, who was in his early thirties (his dates are 1819-1877), was making his most audacious assaults on conventional taste. Without the two oversized compositions of the 1850s, The Burial at Ornans (1850) and The Painter's Studio (1855), and some of the studies of peasant life, The Stone Breakers (1850) and The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair (1855) Courbet was made to appear a more private personality than he obviously actually was. And yet the very absence of The Burial at Ornans and The Painter's Studio had the effect of highlighting what many of us already believed, which is that Courbet's greatness is not really based on a few large, invented figure compositions but on the high level of originality that he brought to a wide range of subjects, generally treated in easel-painting sizes.
      The Burial at Ornans isn't really topnotch Courbet; the downbeat mood of the story is carried over too much into a pictorial dullness — that dark frieze of figures just goes on and on, uninteresting, uneventful. And while The Studio is, area by area, a succession of little masterpieces, it never really adds up to a masterful whole. (The Studio is unfinished.) In the context of the galleries of the Louvre, where The Burial and The Studio hung before their transfer to the Musée d'Orsay, it was quite clear that Delacroix, not Courbet, was the final artist to feel at ease when working on a monumental scale. Tackling a three- or five-meter canvas in The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) and The Massacre at Chios (1823), Delacroix is totally in control — his arabesques and twisting rhythms expand to fill the space. Courbet's grasp of composition is more episodic and eccentric; his finest paintings have an effect of strangeness and surprise that's probably irreconcilable with the idea of the wall-sized masterpiece.
^      Courbet painted landscapes, portraits, nudes, and still lifes off and on all through his life. And from the very start of the show, where we see a wall of youthful self-portraits, to the very end, where we see the paintings of heaps of apples, he manages to give each subject a unique, freestanding value. Even when he's working on various versions of a single motif — as in the seascapes — he avoids formulaic solutions. He certainly, never expects the kinds of techniques or structural ideas that work in a seascape to work in a landscape or a still life. He puts us in touch with the strangely awkward beauty of the landscape where he grew up — the Jura plateau in eastern France, through which the Doubs River winds, creating dramatic gorges and waterfalls. And he brings an equally deep but different sensitivity to the misty immensities of the Atlantic Ocean, which he visited as a tourist. Everywhere, one feels his supreme sense of scale, how the relation of tiny boa is to enormous cloud formations in the seascapes is every bit as exact and poetically right as the relation of trees, towns, and rock formations in the paintings of the Jura plateau. Courbet responds as completely to the frozen loneliness of an animal foraging in winter — in The Snowy Landscape with Boar (1867) — as he does to the little fishing boats at the Cliffs of Etretat, just after a storm.
      In a sense, Courbet is a promiscuous artist: he likes to imagine himself in the landscape of childhood, or in the hostile world of winter, or at the seashore. And this promiscuity jibes with the largeness of the personality that we know from the history books — of the man who got involved and messed up in political developments around the Commune, and who made dramatic gestures, as when, in anger over the rejection of some paintings from the Universal Exposition of 1855, he opened his own pavilion. But what the public histories don't really tell us is the extent to which the man could be authentic in different situations. That's what the paintings tell us. The bravado of the paint handling resolves into a perfect transparency of expression.
^

—     Courbet a sa légende, dont il ne faut être qu'à moitié complice. Le réaliste, l'apôtre du laid", le tombeur de la colonne Vendôme ne sont qu'un des profiles d'une peinture aussi riche que contradictoire. "Sans idéal ni religion", proclamait-il, mais avant tout, peintre. Au publiciste Francis Way, il déclare : "je peins comme un dieu", et cet orgueil, souvent moqué, manifeste dans son goût presque narcissique de l'autoportrait, est celui d'un homme à l'extraordinaire métier, dont les ambitions, mêmes confuses, sont toujours sauvées par la réussite picturale.
      La part, chez Courbet, de l'atavisme familial et géographique est évidente. Le père, mi-hobereau, mi-paysan, un "cudot", synonyme franc-comtois de "chimérique", le grand père maternel, fidèle aux principes de 1789, la mère, prudente et avisée, expliquent beaucoup de la psychologie complexe du peintre. Quant à Ornans et à la vallée de la Loue, le peintre y trouvera une source continue d'inspiration.
      Sa vocation s'affirme très tôt. Après des études quelconques au petit séminaire d'Ornans, puis à Besançon où il s'initie à la peinture et pratique la lithographie, il va à Paris, en 1840, pour faire son droit, en vérité pour peindre. Ses débuts sont obscurs; on sait qu'il fréquente plusieurs ateliers en élève libre. Mais, s'il s'échappe au cursus académique, on ne doit assurément pas sous-estimer la formation et la culture du jeune Courbet. Les oeuvres des années 1840-1848, que l'on peut qualifier par leur sujet (Guitarrero, 1845) ou par leur manière (L'homme à la pipe, 1846) de romantique, surprennent par la qualité immédiate du métier, la complexité des influences : italiens, des Venise à Naples, espagnols, nordiques sont les modèles auxquels le peintre se réfère. Dans Courbet au chien noir, 1842, l'autorité de la mise en page, l'élégance du contour enfermant l'animal et son maître, la simplicité de l'effet clair-obscur, la clarté enfin du paysage sont d'un peintre savant qui rend autant d'hommages à Bellini, Titien et même Bronzino. Avec un arsenal narratif réduit à l'extrême, les amants dans la campagne (deux versions) sont d'un lyrisme sans fadeur, immédiatement populaire.
      Le peintre s'affirme au salon de 1849. Parmi les sept toiles qu'il envoi, si l'homme à la ceinture de cuir , "étude des Vénitiens" comme il est précisé, reste dans la lignée des autoportraits précédents, l'Après-dîner à Ornans apporte quelque chose de nouveau. Cette réunion d'amis surprend par son format; Courbet oser traiter en grand la scène du genre. Aussi bien, l'influence d'un voyage fait en hollande en 1848 a-t-elle été décisive : "Rembrandt charme les intelligences et il étourdit les imbéciles, Van Ostade, Van Craesbeek me séduisent." Le romancier et critique Champfleury ne s'y trompe pas et égare l'oeuvre "aux grandes assemblées de bourgmestres de Van der Helst". Le rapprochement est à moitié juste (Courbet était plus prés des peintres monochromes que du brillant de Van der Helst), et le tableau trop sombre à mal vieilli, mais il sacrait un peintre original, depuis toujours étranger à l'idéalisme ingresque, désormais libéré du romantisme.
      Avec l'Enterrement à Ornans (Salon de 1850-51), objet de scandale et succès à la fois, la légende de Courbet est formée. Rassemblement de portraits (Les habitants d'Ornans, du maire au fossoyeur, ont posés), l'Enterrement sidère par sa vérité autant que par son format. Un épisode banal est traité avec le même soin et la même attention psychologique que le Sacre de Napoléon par David. Les réaction sont violentes : " Est-il possible de peindre des gens si affreux " demandent des bourgeois dans un dessin de Daumier. " Accès farouche de misanthropie ", " ignobles caricatures inspirant le dégoût et provocant le rire ", telles sont les appréciations de la critique.
      Faire vrai ce n'est rien pour être réaliste, c'est faire laid qu'il faut, rime Théodore de Banville. Le contresens que l'oeuvre de Courbet n'allait cesser de susciter est là. En fait, l'Enterrement est une page d'humanité où Courbet, avec une attention scrupuleuse et la sympathie d'un " pays ", montre comment un village réagit devant la mort. " Est-ce la faute du peintre, dit Champfleury, si les intérêts matériels, les égoïsmes sordides, la mesquinerie de province clouent leurs griffes sur la figure, éteignent ces yeux, plissent les fronts? " Mais Courbet n'a oublié ni l'émotion ni l'affliction vraie, et sa comédie humaine est aussi complexe que celle de Balzac. la leçon satirique, le jugement moral sont second; le réel, en fait, est magnifié, devient vérité générale grâce à la largeur du traitement, à la science du groupement désordonné des assistants, au lyrisme de la couleur : Vélasquez et Hals peuvent être évoqués.
      Désormais, Courbet est sacré par la critique comme le chef des réaliste aux côtés de Champfleury. Les provocations du personnage, les propos tenus à la brasserie Andler, lieu de réunion du cénacle, expliquent la célébrité tapageuse qui va être celle de l'école. Mais il faut n'accepter qu'avec prudence les appellations. Lorsque Courbet, à l'Exposition internationale de 1855, décidera hardiment d'organiser une présentation séparée de ses oeuvres, il s'expliquera dans la préface de son catalogue : " Le titre de réaliste m'a été imposé comme on a imposé aux hommes de 1830 le titre de romantiques. Etre a même de traduire les moeurs, les idées, l'aspect de mon époque, selon mon appréciation, en un mot faire de l'art vivant, tel est mon but. " Aussi bien Courbet voit-il avant de penser. Les casseurs de pierres (Salon de 1850-51, détruit à Dresde durant la 2ème guerre mondiale) peinture socialiste selon Proudhon, sont nés d'abord d'une rencontre, d'une vision de misère sur une route: " C'est sans le vouloir, simplement en peignant ce que j'ai vu, que j'ai soulevé ce qu'ils appellent la question sociale."
     Un "oeil", avait dit Ingres de Courbet, et il semble bien que le goût de peindre soit premier. Les demoiselles de village (Salon de 1852) sont bien un sujet social, l'aumône des soeurs du peintre à une gardeuse de vaches, mais l'essentiel pour l'artiste était un problème pictural, celui d'intégrer des personnages dans un site. De même le tableau des Baigneuses , cravaché dit-on par Napoléon III au Salon de 1853, est il presque détaché du sujet. Quoi de plus académique qu'un nu dans un paysage ? "La vulgarité des formes ne serait rien, c'est la vulgarité et l'inutilité de la pensée qui sont abominables", note Delacroix dans son Journal, rejoignant Ingres et annonçant Baudelaire dans une paradoxale mais compréhensible alliance contre une peinture aussi désintéressée et "antisurnaturaliste". Les baigneuses furent achetées par Alfred Bruyas, collectionneur sensible et distingué, que tout aurait dû séparer de Courbet, si ce n'est l'amour de la peinture; la rencontre, admirable tableau de plein air, moqué pour le narcissisme du sujet, est un hommage mérité à un véritable amateur.

      En même temps, sous l'influence de Proudhon, comme poussé par sa propre réputation, Courbet se convainc qu'il est un peintre socialiste et participe à la rédaction du Principe de l'art et de sa destination sociale (1865), qui propose une nouvelle lecture de son oeuvre : ainsi la nudité déformée des Baigneuses devient un avertissement des dangers de la vie paresseuse et débilitante de la bourgeoisie; les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine (Salon de 1857) sont une image de l'univers triste du luxe.
      L'Atelier du peintre, "allégorie réelle, intérieur de mon atelier, déterminant sept années de ma vie artistique" (exposition de 1855) est une ambitieuse synthèse de l'idéologie de Courbet. L'échec relatif vient de ce que la transcription symbolique reste confuse et que on est surtout sensible à des "morceaux" , comme celui de la femme nue qui regarde Courbet peindre. Le retour de la conférence (Salon de 1863, détruit) lourde sotie qui montre des curés en goguette après un bon dîner, est trop picaresque pour être réaliste : la volonté de satire empêche ici la réussite franche.
      Paradoxalement, Courbet triomphe avec les tableaux sans "problèmes".La femme au perroquet (New York, Metropolitan Muséum) appelle pour Jules Antoine Castagnary la comparaison avec Titien, tandis que les troublantes Dormeuse (1866) et l'origine du monde savent séduire l'ambassadeur de Turquie Khalil Bey, acheteur du Bain turc d'Ingres. Les grandes composions comme le Combat des cerfs, la Remise des chevreuils (1861 et 1866), l'Hallali du cerf (1867) valent à Courbet ses francs succès populaires. Il y montre tout son savoir de la nature et des animaux, confirmé par des séjours dans les forêts germaniques, avec une verve et une facilité quelquefois un peu lâchées.
      Le peintre à succès mérite alors la Légion d'honneur, que le socialiste olympien n'hésite pas à refuser. La guerre de 1870, les événements de la Commune vont bouleverser le cours de la vie de Courbet. Président de la commission nommée par les artistes pour veiller à la conservation des musées et richesses d'art, il joue le rôle d'un directeur des beaux-arts. Il se signale avec la pétition du 14 septembre 1870 demandant le déboulonnage de la colonne Vendôme, "monument dénué de toute valeur artistique, tendant à perpétuer par son expression les idées de guerre et de conquêtes que réprouve le sentiment d'une nation républicaine"; il est présent lorsqu'on abat la Colonne le 16 mai 1871. Après l'effondrement de la Commune, Courbet le "révolutionnaire" est arrêter et traduit en conseil de guerre. Condamné à six mois de prison, il purge sa peine à Sainte-Pélagie. Là, le peintre donne certains de ses tableaux les plus savoureux de texture, en particulier une série de natures mortes aux fruits, ou peint de mémoire marines et paysages avec un dépouillement et un amour qui émeuvent.
      La suite des sa vie est marquée par le souci de ses dettes; on le refuse au salon de mai 1873; lorsque l'Assemblée adopte le projet de reconstruction de la colonne Vendôme et que Courbet est rendu solidaire des frais, il doit s'exiler en Suisse. La vente judiciaire de 1877 l'accable, et il meurt le 31 décembre. "Ne le plaignons pas, il à traversé les grands courants, il a entendu battre comme des coups de canon le coeur d'un peuple et il a fini en pleine nature, au milieu des arbres", dira en guise d'oraison funèbre cet autre réfractaire que fut Jules Vallès.
— The students of Courbet included Henri Fantin-Latour, E. L. Henry, Olaf Isaachsen.
— Portrait of Courbet (etching 29x20cm; full size) by Etienne-Gabriel Bocourt [1821-1882]

^
— LINKS
— Landscape in the Jura (1864, 72x91cm; 3/20 size, 51kb _ ZOOM to 3/10 size, 180kb _ ZOOM++ to 3/5 size, 681kb)
— Le bois aux biches au bord du ruisseau de Plaisir-Fontaine (1866, 174x209cm; 838x1007pix, 151kb _ ZOOM to 1676x2012pix, 376kb)
— Chute d'Eau (823x1255pix, 102kb)
— La Vague (774x1097pix, 177kb)
— Vagues (985x1229pix, 110kb)
— Les Falaises d'Étretat (721x900pix, 55kb)
— Bords de la Seine (809x973pix, 45kb)
— Enterrement à Ornans (1850, 314x663cm; 800x1752pix, 134kb _ ZOOM to 1400x3076pix, 1040kb)
— Cribleuses de blé (772x1068pix, 100kb _ ZOOM to 1400x1784pix, 624kb)
— Le studio de l'artiste - Allégorie réelle: occupant sept ans de ma vie artistique et morale (1855; 682x1169pix, 152kb _ ZOOM to 1400x2411pix, 879kb)
— Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet aka La Rencontre (1854; 958x1080pix, 84kb _ ZOOM to 1400x1591pix, 645kb) _ Out on his way to some plein air painting, Courbet meets the art philanthropist Alfred Bruyas and his servant.)
— Alfred Bruyas (1853; 600x469pix, 88kb _ ZOOM to 1400x1095pix, 328kb)
— Courbet au Chien Noir (832x1100pix, 64kb _ ZOOM to 1683x1400pix, 615kb)
— Self~Portrait (43x35cm; half-size, 72kb _ ZOOM to full size, 263kb) (you may want to increase the brightness of your screen for this one)
— Self-Portrait (Man with a Pipe) (1849)
— Château d'Ornans (1855, 82x117cm; quarter-size; 826x1186pix, 619kb _ ZOOM to half-size 1653x2393pix, 2810kb) _ The country around Courbet's native town of Ornans, in eastern France, inspired most of his paintings. Like his contemporaries who worked near Barbizon, Courbet revitalized the landscape tradition with views of distinctive regional features observed at first hand. The town of Ornans appears in the valley below.
— Portrait of the Artist's Sister (32x25cm; full size)
— Juliette Courbet (1844; 1400x1159pix, 462kb)
— The Young Ladies of the Village (1852) — The Sleeping Spinner (1853)
— The Fox in the Snow (1860)
— Beach Scene, (1874, 38x55cm) _ Painted later in life than many of his beach scenes, this picture of the shores of Lake Geneva was made when Courbet was in exile in Switzerland. Its composition refers back to the ‘sea landscapes’ he painted in the 1860s, although here one small figure appears on the shore. Courbet uses minimal colors to convey the mood and the natural elements, while the style of this work is more refined than his previous paintings of similar subjects.
— Low Tide at Trouville, (1865, 60x73cm) _ This is a particularly harmonious painting in terms of color and mood. It was painted during Courbet’s 1865 trip to Trouville, and shows the artist experimenting with ways of creating depth on a two-dimensional surface. The salmon-pink horizon constitutes over a third of the painting, dissolving into softer pinks, grey and blue for the sky and to browner tones for the beach. At this stage in his career Courbet was very much influenced by Whistler, whose seascapes show great attention to the blending of color.
— The Wave (1871, 46x55cm) _ Although Courbet would have observed waves breaking, it is obviously inconceivable for any painter to sketch or paint one particular wave. Its motion, although repetitive, is never identical, and (until the development of snapshot photography) impossible to capture. A wave represents one moment in time – here in thickly laid-on paint, the crest of the wave curls over and crashes towards the front of the painting. This creates a sense of immediacy for the viewer, as if we are witnessing the wave spilling towards us.
— L'Eternité (1865, 65x79cm) _ This intense and melancholy painting is painted over a dark ground (or underlayer) which explains its somber tone; as Courbet himself said: ‘Nature without the sun is also dark and black. I do as the light does, I illuminate the parts that project and the picture is done’. The title draws our attention to the vast expanse of sea and sky, its timelessness and our own relative inconsequence.
— Le Pont d'Ambrussum (1857; 600x809pix _ ZOOM to 1400x1888pix, 970kb)
— Le Repas de Chasse aka L'Hallali du Chevreuil (1858; 600x945pix _ ZOOM to 1400x2206pix, 1711kb)
— Pêcheur au bord de la Loue
— Portrait of the Artist, called "The Wounded Man" (1854 _ ZOOM)
— The Cellist, Self-Portrait (1847)
— Portrait of the Artist (Man with a Pipe) (1849)
— The Bathers (1853) — The Sleeping Spinner (1853)
— The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) (1857; _ ZOOM)
— The Oak at Flagey (The Oak of Vercingétorix) (1864) — The Source of the Loue (1864)
— Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl (1865) — Seacoast (1865)
— The Sleepers, or Sleep (1866)
— Woman with a Parrot (1866)
— The real, abstract, clean, honest L'Origine du monde (2004; 450x600pix, 116kb _ ZOOM to 1050x1400pix, 1264kb) by “Eva Tsug-Tebrouk” replaces Courbet's X-rated misnamed L'Origine du monde (1866) because this is a site that avoids anything that might be considered unsuitable for children, though young children are more likely to be disgusted rather than harmed by such pictures, which are more unsuitable for adult men, and most unsuitable for teenaged boys. Courbet's painting is deceptively named, as it does not show the origin of the world, but, presumably with the intention of shocking, features prominently the (very hairy in this case) anatomical part out of which a human comes out at birth.
— Count de Choiseul's Greyhounds (1866) — The Woman in the Waves (1866)
— The Source (1868) — The Cliff at Etretat after the Storm (1869)
— Still Life with Apples and Pomegranate (1872)
— Still Life: Fruit (1872) — The Trout (1872)
— Woman in a Podoscaphe (1865; 911x1103pix, 146kb)
— P.-J. Proudhon en 1853 with two young girls, one drawing, one playing (1865; 818x1105pix, 164kb)
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon alone (1865; 1128x892pix)
— The Beach at Trouville at Low Tide (1865; 761x1026pix)
— The Beach at Trouville at High Tide (1865; 791x1127pix)
— Deer in the Snow (1867; 890x1108pix)
— Dear Taking Shelter from the Winter Snow (1866; 831x1129pix, 350kb)
— 133 images at Webshots
— 230 images at Bildindex

^ Born on 31 December 1869: Henri Matisse, French painter who died on 03 November 1954.
— Matisse was born at Le Cateau-Cambrésis in the North of France. His parents, Emile Matisse and Héloise Gérars, had a general store selling household goods and seed. Henri planned on a legal career, and in 1887/88 studied law in Paris, in 1889 he was employed as a clerk in a solicitor’s office. It was in 1890 that he was first attracted to painting. Confined to his bed for nearly a year (1890) after an intestinal operation, he chose drawing as a pastime. Then the hobby took best of him and he decided for the painting career.
     The long years of learning followed: in 1891 Matisse studied under Bouguereau at the Académie Julian, and in 1892 transferred unofficially to Gustave Moreau’s studio at the École Beaux-Arts, where he met Marquet, at the same time attending the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs. In 1894 his daughter Marguerite was born, though Matisse did not marry the mother, Amélie Paraere, till 1898.
      In 1896 he made a successful début at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and a year later displayed there his large canvas La Desserte, which showed the influence of the Impressionists. After Moreau’s death in 1898, he studied briefly with Cormon, then left the École des Beaux-Arts and entered the Académie Carrière where he met Derain and Puy and attended evening classes in sculpture. In 1899 his son Jean, and then, in 1900, his son Pierre were born. Financial difficulties made him to stay for some time with his parents.
      During the period of 1899-1904 Matisse participated in a group exhibition at Berthe Weil’s Gallery (1902), painted townscapes with Marquet in Paris, spent the summer of 1904 working with Signac and Cross at Saint-Tropez, and in 1905-6 painted views of Collioure.
      In 1905 and 1906 Matisse, his talent now fully developed, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants together with Derain, Marquet, Vlaminck, Rouault and others and sparked off controversy. The group was ironically nicknamed “Les Fauves”. At that time Matisse displayed a tendency towards monumental, decorative compositions. If in 1900 it was only to earn some money that he took on the task of painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris, in 1907 he worked with enthusiasm on a ceramic triptych, Nymph and Satyr, for Osthaus’s mansion in Hagen, Westphalia. In 1908 Matisse painted the monumental canvas The Red Room (Harmony in Red); and in 1909-10 executed two large decorative panels, The Dance and The Music on commissions from the Moscow businessman S. Shchukin.
      Sculpture, too, began to occupy a significant place in Matisse’s artistic endeavor and was exhibited for the first time in 1912, in New York. At this time, Matisse set forth the theoretical basis for his art in his Notes d’un peintre (1908) and expounded his views on painting in the art school (l'Atelier Matisse), which he had organized. But soon teaching began to weigh heavily on the artist, and he withdrew more and more frequently to Issy-des-Moulineaux.
      In 1910 Matisse visited Munich to see an exhibition of Islamic art, in 1911 Seville, then Moscow on the invitation of S. Shchukin, and at the end of that year, Tangier, Morocco. From 1914 to 1918 he divided his time between Collioure, Paris and Nice. In 1918 a Matisse-and-Picasso exhibition opened at the Guillaume Gallery: it was to a certain extent indicative of the role of these two painters in contemporary art.
      In 1920 Matisse designed the stage sets and costumes for S. Diaghilev’s ballet The Nightingale (to Stravinsky’s music) and in 1939 for Léonide Massine’s ballet Rouge et Noir (to the music of Shostakovich’s first Symphony). In 1931-1933 he painted a large decorative composition, The Dance; the same years he fulfilled etching illustrations for Mallarmé’s Poésies. In 1934-35 Matisse produced cartoons for carpets, based on James Joyce’s Ulysses.
      During the Second World War Matisse lived in the south of France – Bordeaux, Ciboure, Nice. In 1941 he underwent a serious operation. Confined to bed for most of the ensuing period, he turned his attention to book design and illustrations. He designed and illustrated Henri de Montherlant’s Pasiiphaë in 1944, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Mariana Alcoforado’s (*) Lettres Portugaises (70 lithographs) and Reverdy’s Visages (14 lithographs) in 1946, André Rouveyre's Repli (12 lithographs) in 1947, and Ronsard’s Amours in 1948. His unique book Jazz, published in 1947, contained a facsimile reproduction of the text written in the artist’s own hand and illustrations executed in gouache after Matisse’s cut-outs.
      It was only after the end of the war that Matisse turned anew to monumental compositions. He executed sketches for the stained-glass panel representing St. Dominique in the church at Assy (1948), the interior decoration for the Dominican chapel of Notre-Dame du Rosaire at Vence (1948-1951), and sketches for the stained-glass panel Rose for the Uniate Church in New York (1954). In his last years he devoted a great deal of his time to cut-outs and brush drawings.
— Regarded by some as the most important French painter of the 20th century. Leader of the Fauvist movement (about 1900). Pursued the expressiveness of color throughout his career. Subjects were largely domestic or figurative, and a distinct Mediterranean verve presides in the treatment.
— Henri Matisse was the most important French painter of the 20th century, rivaling Picasso in his influence. His background was diverse. He studied under Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau and experimented with Pointillism, which he found rigidly confining. Later, building on the work of Cézanne and Gauguin, he and André Derain developed Fauvism, a much freer and more expressive style of painting which was in fact the forerunner of Expressionism.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait (1918) — Self-Portrait in a Striped T-Shirt (1906)
— Autoportrait (1944 lithograph, 38x25cm; 2/5 size)
— La Jeune Fille en Rose (1923, 56x39cm; half-size — ZOOM to full size)
— Fleurs (1950; 48x37cm; 1/3 size)
— Dinner Table (1897) _ detail (the servant) — Le bonheur de vivre (1906)
— Sea at Collioure (1906) — The Bank (1907) — La Conversation (1909)
— Odalisque, Half-Length (The Tatoo) (1923) — Odalisque (1923)
— Odalisque, Harmony in Red (1926) — Odalisque in a Gauze Skirt (1929)
— Odalisque on a Turkish Sofa (1928) — Odalisque with Green Scarf (1926)
— Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1926)
— Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi (1902, 72x5cm) — Polynesia, The Sea (1946)
— The Dance 1 _ The Dance 2 _ The Dance 3 (1933)
— Music (1910) _ detail — Woman Reading (1894)
— The Inattentive Reader — Reader in the Garden (1921)

— Icarus (1947, 42x26cm) _ This bold and playful image is one of twenty plates Matisse created to illustrate his groundbreaking book Jazz. The illustrations derive from maquettes of cut and pasted colored papers, which were then printed using a stencil technique known as "pochoir." Here, the mythological figure Icarus is presented in a simplified form floating against a royal blue nighttime sky. Matisse's flat, abstracted forms and large areas of pure color marked an important change in the direction of his later work and ultimately influenced "hard-edge" artists of the 1960s like Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held.
This work, one of Matisse’s well-known cutouts, accompanied the text of "The Airplane" in his book Jazz. Depicting a man with a red circle pasted on for his heart falling through the night sky, the subject matter of this cutout was typical of other scenes in this book. The pure colors speak of the past but more specifically of the sickness Matisse had suffered during World War II. The cutouts of 1943 are the first art pieces that Matisse worked on at night, in lamplight rather than sunlight. His night, in these scenes, speaks of insomnia and emptiness, abstractions that can be filled only by painting and memory. By foregoing the literal in his art at this point, Matisse is said to have been surrendering the body, which was aged, in favor of the mind. The childish act of cutting and then combining pure colors symbolized for Matisse a return to the past, to the "human element" of art.
— La Danse (1910) [different the 3-panel Dance of 1933) _ This painting features five naked women dancing on a green and blue background, a color combination symbolic of the earth. The two women whose faces are turned away from the viewer cannot reach their hands together. Each figure is involved in her own world, connected to but distant from the others. In this crude, simple depiction of humans and nature, Matisse succeeded in revealing his vision of the universal. The individual, though for the most part unaware of his deep link with the rest of the world, cannot separate himself from others. Nature is the modest background that in fact subtly dominates life. This painting is only one of many for which Matisse used his extensive studies of nude women.
_ Matisse dedicated his career to developing a decorative, expressive form of abstraction. Among his best known works is the mural-sized canvas Dance (II), commissioned in 1909 by Sergei Shchukin, a Russian merchant who had previously purchased several of Matisse’s paintings. Intended for a grand, three-story staircase in Shchukin’s home, Matisse conceived of Dance (II) as part of a suite of three paintings: Dance (II), Music, and a scene of repose. Because of the scandal Dance (II) and Music caused at the Salon d’Automne of 1910 — Matisse’s use of intense, vibrant colors in the former was even more shocking than the male nudes that populate Music — Shchukin briefly hesitated before accepting the two canvases. For unknown reasons, he refused the third canvas, which Matisse reworked several times between 1909 and 1916, when he titled it Bathers by a River. The idea of dance clearly occupied Matisse’s imagination for several years. A ring of dancers appears in the distant background of Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre (1906), a painting that celebrates life’s hedonistic pleasures. Dance (II) literally and figuratively expands this theme: five nude women hold hands as they cavort atop a grassy knoll, entirely filling the canvas. The stylized lines of the dancers’ bodies radiate energy and grace. The group’s circular motion directs attention to the center of the canvas, indicating unity and balance. Matisse rendered the scene in vivid shades of red, blue, and green that emphasize the intense joy of the dance. Vibrant, lyrical, exultant — this ring of dancers eternally symbolizes life’s ecstasy.
— Luxe, Calme, et Volupté (1904) This painting marks a transition from the Impressionist style of Matisse’s early days to his later obsession with "making colors sing, without paying any heed to rules and regulations." The pastel colors — often depicting the two legs of a woman in different colors — conjure the mystical feeling of Baudelaire’s poem, from which this title is taken. In itself, the Pointillist style was not successful for Matisse; he found it too logical and did not sincerely feel a part of the work. What he played with in the paint and began to understand, however, was the purity of color. The joy portrayed in this painting through the clean, fresh light helped Matisse discover his artistic strength. In addition, this painting marks the first time Matisse depicted nudes in the sensual and carefree way that characterized many later works of his career. In a sense, this painting represents Matisse’s rite of passage into himself. He moved to Nice soon after completing this work, and he continued to progress in the reflections on color for which he is known.
— The Red Studio (1911) "A painter exists only in terms of his pictures," Matisse once said. The studio, in that case, is the sacred home that the artist devotes his life to maintaining and enriching. This painting, one of many that depicted an artist’s studio, is famous for the warm, deep red that dominates it. On a simple level, this work itemizes the objects and other paintings from Matisse’s studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux. The picture is both spatial and flat, since the perspective lines and outlines of three-dimensional objects are drawn only in light yellow lines, while flat objects such as pictures are filled in with color. In addition, the theme of "art in art" (paintings inside a painting), culminated in this piece, followed Matisse throughout his life. According to Matisse, the artist was confined to his studio; though his imagination and observations could venture outside of the studio, the essence of his life never would.
— Interior of the Chapel of the Rosary, Vence _ Matisse began working on this four-year project in the late 1940s. In 1941, he had undergone an operation, and he wanted to thank the nuns who took care of him during his convalescence. The chapel is small and modest, embracing light as its main and purest feature. All the art forms in the building -- drawing, sculpture and architecture -- were subordinated to a spiritual opening through stained glass to the light outside. His chief aim "was to balance a surface of light and color against a solid wall with black drawing on a white background." He used paper cutout maquettes for the windows and vestments according to the notion that this material was "form filtered to its essentials." The simplicity characteristic of this chapel, mixed with the profound emotion with which Matisse viewed its creation, made the building his masterpiece. Both in philosophy and craftsmanship, Matisse saw the chapel as his "revelation."

(*) Soror Mariana Alcoforado (1640-1723) nasceu e faleceu em Beja. Era uma religiosa que professou no Convento da Conceição em Beja, tendo sido escrivã e vigária do mesmo convento. Foi-lhe atribuída a autoria das Lettres Portugaises, publicadas em Paris em 1669 por Claude Barbin. No mesmo ano são publicadas em Colónia com o título Lettres d'amour d'une religieuse portugaise. Nesta última edição, uma nota informa que as cartas foram dirigidas ao cavaleiro de Chamilly e tinham sido traduzidas para francês por Guilleragues. Boissonade faz saber em 1810 que encontrou um manuscrito das cartas que indica que a autora das mesmas se chamava «Mariana Alcaforada, religiosa em Beja». Os investigadores actuais duvidam, no entanto, da atribuição desta autoria. As cartas tiveram várias traduções para português
— Les Lettres portugaises traduites en français ont paru, sans nom d'auteur, le 04 janvier 1669, chez le libraire Claude Barbin, "au Palais, sur le second perron de la Sainte-Chapelle". L'auteur en serait un certain chevalier de Guilleragues, dont on ne connaît que ce seul texte.

Died on a 31 December:

1970 Henri de Waroquier, French artist born on 08 January 1881.

^ 1911 (18 Dec Julian) Grigory Grigor'yevich Myasoyedov, Russian painter born on 19 April 1834. The son of a small village landowner, he studied from 1853 to 1862 at the Saint-Petersburg Academy of Art under Timofey Andreyevich Neff [1805–1876] and Aleksey Tarasovich Markov [1802–1878]. At the end of the 1850s he became friendly with Ivan Kramskoy and his circle of progressive students. Myasoyedov had his first significant success with the painting Congratulating the Young People in the Landowner’s House (1861), which is done within the traditions of idyllic genre painting of the 1850s. In the competition for the Grand Gold Medal in 1862 Myasoyedov submitted the historical work The Flight of Grigory Otrep’yev from the Tavern on the Lithuanian Border, inspired by a scene in Pushkin’s drama Boris Godunov. The picture, an attempt at social and historical authenticity, won the artist a six-year scholarship to France, Germany and Italy. In Florence in 1867 Myasoyedov became acquainted with the artist Nicolay Ge and his circle of liberal Russian intellectuals, students and admirers of the writings of Alexander Hertzen and Mikhail Bakunin. In 1869 Myasoyedov and Ge, among others, put forward the idea of forming the Wanderers (actually founded 1870), with support from Moscow and St Petersburg realist artists. From this time Myasoyedov was intimately involved with the affairs of the Wanderers, and he remained an active member and exhibitor to the end of his life. Myasoyedov became an Academician in 1870, and the decade 1870–1879 was a time of great public acclaim for him. With Konstantin Savitsky, Vasily Maksimov and Il’ya Repin, he formed the main principles of Wanderers realism in genre painting: an obligatory socio-analytical approach to the subject, with clearly expressed sympathy towards the peasantry. In the painting of the Zemstvo at Dinner (1872), his most significant work, he laid bare the roots of social inequality in pre-reform Russia. In numerous works he created a broad gallery of impressive and dignified peasant characters; the beauty and grandeur of peasant labor in The Scythers (1887), for example, transforms them and humanizes nature. The style of Myasoyedov’s genre paintings is distinguished by its emotional restraint and severity, and by the accentuated ordinariness of his serious, down-to-earth narrative. He constantly adopted historical subject-matter, as in The Self-immolators (1884), and he painted portraits and landscapes. During the 1890s Myasoyedov, who had proved unable to adopt the new ideals of the young factions of the Wanderers, occupied an inflexible conservative position in the association, for which he was criticized.

1889 Joseph Pierre Olivier Coomans, Belgian artist born on 28 July 1816.

1864 August-Karl-Friedrich von Kloeber, German artist born on 21 August 1793.

1698 Joost (or Jan) van Geel, Dutch artist born on 20 October 1631.

1679 Ottmar Elliger I, Swedish-born (08 September 1633) German painter of still-lifes of flowers and fruits. He studied under Daniel Seghers in Antwerp, then worked in Amsterdam about 1660 before settling in Hamburg in 1666 and entering the service of the Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg in Berlin in 1670. He was the father of Ottmar Elliger II [19 Feb 1666 – 19 Feb 1735].

1676 Klaes Molenaer, Dutch artist born before 1630. — Relative? of Jan Miense Molenaer [1610 – 19 Sep 1668 bur.] ?

Born on a 31 December:

1864 Hans am Ende, German artist whose end on this earth came in 1918.

1861 René François Xavier Prinet, French artist who died on 01 February 1946.

^ 1751 Johann Baptist (or Giovanni Battista, Giambatista) Lampi I, in Austrian South Tyrol (now under Italian rule), artist active in Austria, Italy, Poland, and Russia, who died on 11 February 1830 in Vienna. He was the youngest son among the 14 children of Matthias Lampi [1698–1780], a minor church and decorative painter, and his wife, Klara Margarete Lorenzoni. After early training by his father, he went to Salzburg (1768–1870) to study under his uncle Peter Anton Lorenzoni [1721–1782], who painted altarpieces. In Salzburg he probably also received instruction in historical and portrait painting from Franz Xaver König [1711–1782] and Franz Nikolaus Streicher [1738–1811]. Between 1770 and 1773 he studied in Verona under Francesco Lorenzi [1723–1787], a student of Giambattista Tiepolo. Lampi became a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Verona in 1773; during this time he painted several works for churches in the Verona–Trento area and also painted frescoes, for example the ceiling (1772) of the Assunta in Romeno. Influenced at first by the late Baroque style of the Tiepolo school, Lampi gradually began to adopt a classicizing approach, as in the altarpiece Christ on the Cross (1779). However, his work was inclined to be dry and academic, and his only successful religious picture, with its simplified forms and subdued coloring, is the Dead Christ (1779).
Of his three sons and four daughters, Johann Baptist Lampi II [04 Mar 1775 – 17 Feb 1837] and Franz Xaver Lampi [22 Jan 1782 – 22 Jul 1852] were the most important artists. Johann Baptist the younger followed in his father’s footsteps as a portrait painter, and his style is often indistinguishable from the latter’s. Franz Xaver is also noted as a portrait painter. Johann Baptist Matthias Edler von Lampi [1807–1857], the son of Johann Baptist the younger, was a painter working in Vienna. — Besides his children, JB Lampi I had among his students Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Eustatie Altini, Vladimir Borovikovsky, Franz Eybl, Peter Fendi.

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