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Gustave Courbet: The School of Nature (Hardcover)
Gustave Courbet; Edited by Carine Joly, Valerie Pugin; Text written by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, Dominique de Font-R eaulx, …
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The French Realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819-77), a pivotal
figure in the emergence of modern painting, remains an artist whose
interests, attitudes, and friendships are little understood. A
voluminous correspondent, Courbet himself, through his letters,
offers a tantalizing avenue toward a keener assessment of his
character and accomplishments. In her critical edition of over six
hundred of the artist's letters, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu presents
just such a look at the inner life of the artist; her unparalleled
feat of gathering together all of Courbet's known letters, many
heretofore unpublished and untranslated, is sure to change our
evaluation of Courbet's creativity and of his place in
nineteenth-century French life. Beginning when Courbet left his
provincial home at eighteen and ending eight days before his death
in exile in Switzerland, this correspondence enables readers to
follow the artist's development from youth to mature artist of
international repute. Addressed to such varied and key figures of
the Second Empire and the early Third Republic as Charles
Baudelaire, Alfred Bruyas, Max Buchon, Champfleury, Pierre Dupont,
Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Claude Monet, the Comte de
Nieuwerkerke, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jules Simon, Jules Valles,
and Francis Wey, Courbet's letters offer numerous insights into the
artist's private and public personae, his work, and his
participation in the cultural and political life of his day. They
will encourage a rethinking of fixed notions about Courbet while
they help to form a more nuanced picture of the artist's marketing
strategies, his relation to the contemporary media, his deliberate
choice of subject matter for Salon paintings, hispreoccupation with
photography, and his reasons for participating in the Commune. The
correspondence is also important for a better understanding of
Courbet's work. The letters reveal that the artist produced an
uninterrupted flow of portraits of family and friends, work
unaccounted for today that appears to be as crucial to the
development of Courbet's art as his larger, better-known paintings.
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, a recognized expert on nineteenth-century
French art, has spent over ten years collecting, translating, and
annotating these letters. Along with her annotations, she has
provided this edition with an introduction, a detailed chronology,
short biographies of Courbet's correspondents and persons appearing
frequently in the letters, a list of paintings and sculptures
mentioned in the letters, and an inventory of the letters and their
whereabouts. The result is an invaluable cultural resource, as
useful as it is readable, as illuminating as it is entertaining.
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