- Museum number
- 1925,0711.1
- Description
-
Self-portrait. 1852
Black chalk and charcoal
Verso: Head, turned slightly to right, with beard
Charcoal
- Production date
- 1852
- Dimensions
-
Height: 570 millimetres
-
Width: 450 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
- Label text 2003 (MRK):
Courbet, the leading French 'Realist' painter, made numerous self-portraits, often in fanciful guises. He considered them demonstrations of his inner life though his contemporaries saw them as manifestations of his notorious narcissism. The exhibited drawing is related to a painting in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. His pose in the painting is identical but his hair is shorter, and so the drawing may not have been a direct preparatory study. They may, however, both date from 1852 (the oil is not dated).
Text below by P. Stein, in exhib.cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London, BM, `French Drawings from Clouet to Seurat`, 2005, no.80.
Born in Ornans, a small village in the Franche-Comté region near Switzerland, Courbet came to Paris at the age of twenty but, unlike many provincial-born artists, chose to retain, even to foster, his image as an outsider. His subjects owed more to his background and personal experience than to the sanctioned themes on the walls of the Salon. Inspired by principles of Realism, Courbet produced works that subverted all academic norms and standards by treating the subject of contemporary labourers on the grand scale of history painting and by presenting scenes of eroticism stripped of the veneer of mythology.
He cultivated his own persona with equal obsession and daring, producing over the course of his career a series of self-portraits that have been likened to Rembrandt's. In numerous guises, both painted and drawn, Courbet's self-portraits chronicle his search for identity.(n.2) His earliest were largely Romantic in character; he explored emotional states by presenting himself as contemplative, injured or distraught. In the 1840s the period of his major achievements in formulating a Realist style coincided with his development of a new type of self-portrait where the tortured young man was replaced by a burly and self-confident man of the people. Dark and heavily worked sheets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, present the artist in a worker's hat and smoking a pipe.(n.3)
The BM sheet is one of Courbet's largest and least affected self-portraits, dated 1852, the year following the public exhibition of his groundbreaking works, `A Burial at Ornans` (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and `The Stone Breakers` (formerly the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). He presents himself in a well-lit space, directly engaging the viewer, and without props or attributes, although the full beard would have made him easily recognizable. A seemingly unfinished self-portrait in oil in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen is identical in pose and lighting to the London drawing, although the hair, beard and shirt all differ.(n.4) As H. Rostrup pointed out in 1931, Courbet never adopted the traditional practice of preparing canvases by first making drawn studies; thus one cannot assume the London drawing is preparatory to the Copenhagen painting.(n.5)
Ultimately, Courbet's image of himself, his bohemian lifestyle and his deeply held political convictions all become inseparable from his oeuvre. His self-portrait plays a central role in two major canvases in the years just after the London drawing: `Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet` (1854; Musée Fabre, Montpellier) and `The Painter's Studio, A Real Allegory` (1855; Musée d'Orsay, Paris). In 1854 he wrote to Alfred Bruyas, his friend and staunch supporter: 'I have made in my life quite a few portraits of myself, in proportion as I changed my mental situation; in a word, I have written my life.'(n.6)
Notes
1 Early provenance per R. Fernier, ` La Vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, Catalogue raisonné`, Lausanne and Paris, 1978, II, p.296.
2 See M.-T. de Forges, Musée du Louvre, Paris, `Autoportraits de Courbet`, 1973.
3 Ibid., pp.28 and 37, nos 32 and 45.
4 Exhib.cat., Musée d'Orsay, Paris `Manet, Gauguin, Rodin . . ., Chefs-d'oeuvre de la Ny Carlsherg Glyptotek de Copenhague, 1996, pp.62-3, no.5.
5 H. Rostrup, 'Trois tableaux de Courbet', in `From the Collections of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptofek`, vol.1, Copenhagen, 1931, pp.112-13.
6 Quoted in `Courbet Reconsidered`, cat. by S. Faunce and L. Nochlin, Brooklyn Museum and Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, 1988-89, p.10.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1967-8 BM, Campbell Dodgson
1978 Oct-Dec, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Courbet and Germany, no. 316
1979 Jan-Mar, Stadtische Galerie, Courbet and Germany, no. 316
1984 BM, Master Drawings & Watercolours, no. 138
1996, BM, French Drawings from the BM
2000/1 Dec-Feb, BM Great Court, Human Image
2003/4 Dec-April, BM, NACF exhibition
2005/6 Nov-Jan, New York, Met Mus of Art, Clouet to Seurat/BM, no. 80
2006 June-Oct, BM, Clouet to Seurat/BM, no. 80
2007/8 Oct-Jan, Paris, Galeries Nationale du Grand Palais, Courbet
2011 April-July, Barcelona, MNAC, Realism: The Mark of Courbet
2016-17 Sept-Jan, BM, 'French Portrait Drawings'
2019-2020 20 Sep-19 Jan, Montpellier, Musee Fabre, 'Bonjour Monsieur Courbet!
- Acquisition date
- 1925
- Acquisition notes
- Presented by the NACF, Samuel Courtauld, Percy Moore Turner, George Eumorfopoulos, D.Y.Cameron, J.G.Lousada, Sir Michael Sadler and A.J.Hugh Smith. (The complete list and the sums each contributed to the total price of £400 is in Dodgson's report to the Trustees dated 8 July 1925.)
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1925,0711.1