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Gustave Courbet Quotes
1819–1877 France
Gustave Courbet (10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who was a leading figure in the Realist movement of 19th-century French painting.
France Anarchists Painters Socialists Also known as: Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet
Random Gustave Courbet quote
11 quotes
They continue to be the rage. The salon where they are is jammed with people.
I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.
I, who believe that every artist should be his own teacher, cannot dream of setting myself up as a professor.
It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning.
I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty.'
In a letter of Gustave Courbet (1869)
The sea! The sea!.. ..in her growling fury, she reminds me of a of the caged monster who can devour me.
I must explain to you what I recently had the occasion to tell the congress at Antwerp: I do not have, I cannot have, pupils.
We finally saw the sea, the horizonless sea – how odd for a mountaindweller. We saw the beautiful boats that sail on it. It is too inviting, one feels carried away, one would leave to see the whole world.
Beauty, like truth, is a thing which is relative to the time in which one lives and to the individual capable of understanding it. The expression of the beautiful bears a precise relation to the power of perception acquired by the artist.
[I] painted the very people who had been present at the interment, all the townspeople.
The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830. Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary.