The Painting: This previously unpublished painting is an academy (
académie in French), so called because artists were traditionally trained to draw and then paint in art academies. These ranged from private ateliers, or studios, run by seasoned artists to the state-sponsored Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.[1] A muscular nude male is posed in a three-quarters view from behind. He supports his lower body by resting his left knee on the seat of a padded stool, the dirty sole of his foot exposed, and with his right leg extended straight back, the foot flat on the studio floor. He balances himself by placing his left hand on a plinth and looks to the left. The light falls from the left, resulting in adjacent pools of bright and dark color. The paint is applied boldly and intuitively, and is especially vigorous in the treatment of the hair. Areas of brown underpaint were initially laid down over the white ground for areas of shadow and then left exposed selectively, for example, in the shaded whites of the eyes and buttocks. The figure is set against a loosely brushed background.
Direct study of the human form—to both observe and record it—was fundamental to an artist’s training, and academies served a strictly pedagogical function. Although the figure in this academy is unaccessorized, however, the painting may reveal more about the aim of the exercise that brought it into being than merely capturing the features of the model. The canvas is a squarish rectangle; its length is slightly greater than its height. Nevertheless, the figure is essentially set within a virtual square (approximately 69 centimeters on each side), one divided diagonally by a line that runs from the model’s head to the heel of his right foot. The painting’s geometry compels the beholder to shift focus between the implied square in which the figure is inscribed and the actual rectangle of the canvas. This suggests that the painter’s efforts were enriched by a lesson in the animation of space.
Typically, the names of studio models were not recorded by the artists who portrayed them, as is the case here. Models assumed poses dictated by their employers. The pose might be natural or it might approximate a work of Greek or Roman art—or more recent art emulating antique models. This figure recalls heroic nudes in classic works of art that students could study in public collections such as the Musée du Louvre or in reproduction, either as plaster casts or through engravings. The pose recorded in The Met’s study was likely inspired by two Roman sculptures. The emphatic diagonal pose recalls the marble figure known as the
Borghese Gladiator, which was acquired by Napoleon in 1807 and displayed at the Louvre beginning in 1811. The disposition of the academy figure’s back, the way he supports himself with his right arm, and his fleecy head turned to the side were probably inspired by the Roman marble sculpture widely known as the
Dying Gladiator, in the Musei Capitolini, Rome.[2] Working from the live model, the painter would have been keenly aware of the authority wielded by these two prototypes, but he neglected none of the earthiness of the figure before him.
Attribution to Courbet: The back of the canvas, which is unlined and on its original stretcher, is inscribed in red paint:
A mon collègue et cher / ami Gilbert / G. Courbet (to my colleague and dear / friend Gilbert / G. Courbet). Another inscription, applied with a pen in now-faded brown ink, appears on the stretcher:
Baron Steuben. (For the back of the painting, see fig. 1 above.) By December 1839, shortly after his arrival in Paris, Courbet was receiving instruction in the atelier of history painter baron Charles-Guillaume-Henri-Auguste-François-Louis de Steuben (1788–1856), whose address was 30 rue Hautefeuille, on the Left Bank of the Seine.[3] Steuben’s name may have been added to the stretcher by his supplier. Alternatively, it may have been added to distinguish this study from ones Courbet made nearby at the Académie Suisse, located at 4 quai des Orfèvres, on the Ile de la Cité, which the young artist began to frequent before concluding his tutelage under Steuben, in or after April 1840. The Académie Suisse was an informal and extremely liberal art school founded by a former painter and well-known artist’s model, François Martin Suisse (ca. 1781–1859).[4] There, in the early 1840s, Courbet began to encounter sympathetic young painters such as François Bonvin (1817–1888).
Physical examination of the present work has yielded no evidence that would be inconsistent with an attribution to Courbet (see Technical Notes), yet gaps in the documentation of its early history remain. Thus, further study is required to confirm its role in Courbet’s origins as a painter. Apart from a few written accounts and a small corpus of accepted works, the fruits of Courbet’s first year or so in Paris have largely disappeared.[5] This painting is difficult to reconcile, at least on the basis of a photograph, with the painted academy in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims, whose provenance, beginning with the artist’s youngest sister, Juliette Courbet (1831–1915), is unbroken.[6] Another example is the
Self-Portrait with Upraised Arm rendered in graphite and chalks (The Met
1975.1.589).
Courbet’s Training in Paris, 1839–40: In October 1837, Courbet moved from his native Ornans to enroll at the Collège Royal de Besançon. He quit in 1838 in order to register at the Académie de Besançon, where he devoted himself full-time to learning art. Determined to become a painter, he moved to Paris in the fall of 1839. It is not known why Courbet chose Steuben as a teacher upon arrival in the capital. At a time when aspiring artists considered the attainment of a Prix de Rome to be an assured path to success, no pupil of Steuben’s appears on the competition rosters. Writing to his family from Paris on December 26, 1839, Courbet reported: “I still work with M. Steuben, who does not bother much with his students. All he does is appear every morning. He is satisfied with me. I am, I think, the best in his atelier. We are only three or four.”[7]
In a letter to his family of April 1840, Courbet showed signs of moving on from Steuben: “I go to a life-model class at six o’clock every morning. Ever since the weather has been fine enough to paint outside, I have left my teacher temporarily, for the exhibition and the life class take up all my time, but I will go back. I don’t know whether I’ll return to M. Steuben. I think I’ll go to Picot’s.”[8] The life class may have been held at the Académie Suisse. As for François Edouard Picot (1786–1868), who had been awarded the Prix de Rome for history painting in 1813, he ran a popular atelier that, unlike Steuben’s, yielded many contestants for the prize.
Courbet continued to mention making life studies in letters home. In one, written from Paris on January 25, 1841, he stated: “This is how my day is organized: in the morning at 8 A.M. I go to paint from the live model until 1 P.M. Only at 10 A.M. do I come back to eat a plate of soup the caretaker’s wife makes for me, for my hotel is next door to the academy.” Once again, it is probably the Académie Suisse to which Courbet refers.[9]
Courbet and the Nude: Courbet gained renown by displaying scenes of country life in his native Franche-Comté region at the state-sponsored exhibition, the Salon, held annually in Paris. Many members of the public regarded Courbet’s unsentimentalized and unidealized treatments of everyday subjects on a grand scale to be provocatively coarse and vulgar. One such example, completed for the Salon of 1850–51, is
A Burial at Ornans (1849–50, Musée d’Orsay, Paris); another is
Young Ladies of the Village, shown at the Salon of 1852 (The Met
40.175). Over the course of his career, Courbet plumbed a range of subjects: landscape and seascape, hunting, still life, and portraiture—with a penchant for self-portraits. At least as important were paintings of women, singly and in pairs, physically self-possessed, frequently eroticized, and often unclothed, though lacking the requisite mythological or allegorical pretext generally required by tradition for representing the female nude.
What Courbet painted only rarely, beyond his student work, was the male nude. A notable exception, or near-exception, is
The Wrestlers (fig. 2), a canvas depicting life-size figures that he exhibited at the Salon of 1853. Short of suggesting a direct connection to
The Wrestlers, The Met’s academy serves as a reminder that the male nude was not unprecedented in Courbet’s work. The athletic figure, or figures, seen from behind, which is the view enjoyed from the grandstands shown in
The Wrestlers, was something Courbet had painted as part of his training. In this work, Courbet’s adoption of poses derived from the series
The Labors of Hercules (1632, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), by the Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán, who worked directly from the live model, is illuminating with respect to The Met’s academy.[10] As if to call additional attention to the rear view implied by the position of the spectators in
The Wrestlers, Courbet also exhibited a complementary painting at the 1853 Salon,
The Bathers (fig. 3), in which one of the two women, who is more or less nude, is presented from the back.
Ownership History: As noted above, the painting is inscribed with a dedication to “my colleague and dear friend Gilbert.” A clue to Gilbert’s identity is found in the estate stamp printed in black ink at the lower right corner of the painting and again on its stretcher: JULES GILBERT / 17, RUE DU DRAGON / PARIS. He appears to have been Jules-Julien Gilbert, about whom there is scant information. According to the
Annuaire de l’Association des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Architectes, Graveurs & Dessinateurs, published in Paris in 1907, Gilbert lived at that address and had been active as an
artiste-peintre since at least 1881. The archives of the Association’s successor organization, the Fondation Taylor, confirm Gilbert’s year of death as 1909.[11] Gilbert was also a collector of Middle Eastern antiquities. In 1902, he sold two objects to the Louvre. In 1903, he disposed of his substantial holdings of this material at auction; the catalogue describes him as an
artiste-peintre who had gathered his holdings “pendant son long séjour en Orient où il professait la peinture” (during his lengthy sojourn in the Orient, where he taught painting).[12] Gilbert lived with a Mme Eugénie Gilbert, presumably his wife, who was also an
artiste-peintre; she died in 1923. Their death records have not been located in the city archives, and it may be that the Gilberts used the proceeds of the sale to leave Paris.
As of this writing, no documentation corroborating a relationship between Courbet and Gilbert has come to light. Was Gilbert one of the “three or four” students who worked alongside Courbet in Steuben’s atelier or at the Académie Suisse? If so, and assuming he was born about the same time as Courbet, he would have been approximately ninety years old if he died in 1909. That is not impossible, though it begs the question of whether there were two Gilberts—possibly father and son, both artists—who spanned the period from 1839, when Courbet became Steuben’s pupil; 1877, when Courbet died; to 1909, when Jules-Julien Gilbert died. Or was Courbet linked to Gilbert in another context entirely?
No records give the date when the collector Dikran Garabed Kelekian (1867/68–1951), an art dealer active in Paris and New York from the 1890s onward, acquired the painting from Parisian dealer Jos Hessel. Kelekian and Gilbert may have known one another. They certainly shared deep enthusiasm for Middle Eastern antiquities.[13] Evidently Courbet was also a mutual interest (see, for example, The Met
22.27.1).
Asher Miller 2021
[1] See Albert Boime,
The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1971.
[2] Louvre inv. Ma 527 and Musei Capitolini inv. MC0747. For an introduction to these sculptures, see Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny,
Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1800, New Haven, 1981, pp. 221–27, nos. 43–44.
[3] Steuben is the subject of summary entries in standard biographical dictionaries but has not been treated to in-depth study. He was born in Bauerbach in the Grand Duchy of Baden (now Germany) and moved to Paris to study with François Gérard (1770–1837). He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1812 onward, and was appointed
maître de dessin, or drawing professor, at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in 1831, but took leave, perhaps in 1843, to move to Russia. There he remained for many years before returning to Paris, where he died. It is not known when Steuben opened a private atelier.
[4] Suisse’s full name and life dates were communicated to the author by Stanislav Volkov (emails, 2019 and 2021, Department of European Paintings files). Courbet would open a teaching studio at 82 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs on December 9, 1861 and closed it in April 1862; see Dominique Lobstein, “Chronology,” in Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Laurence des Cars, Michel Hilaire, et al.,
Gustave Courbet, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, p. 435.
[5] Despite the survival of many of Courbet’s letters, some of which are quoted below, there are gaps in the knowledge of Courbet’s early years in Paris. One source, which provides a sense of the texture and spirit of the artist’s trajectory during those years, is the first installment of the three-part article by Courbet’s friend Jules Antoine Castagnary (1830–1888), “Fragments d’un livre sur Courbet,”
Gazette des Beaux-Arts 5 (1911), pp. 5–20; 6 (1912), pp. 488–97; 7 (1912), pp. 19–29; English trans. by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, “A Biography of Courbet,” in Chu, ed.,
Courbet in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, 1977, pp. 6–22.
[6] Inventory no. 893.16.19; see Robert Fernier,
La vie et l'oeuvre de Gustave Courbet, vol. 1,
Peintures, 1819–1865, Lausanne, 1977, pp. 18–19, no. 30, ill. (dated ca. 1842).
[7]
Letters of Gustave Courbet, ed. and trans. Petra ten-Doescchate Chu, Chicago, 1992, p. 29.
[8] Chu 1992, p. 32.
[9] Chu 1992, p. 36.
[10] See Klaus Herding,
Courbet: To Venture Independence, trans. John William Gabriel, New Haven, 1991, ch. 2, “’Les Lutteurs Détestables’: Critique of Style and Society in Courbet’s Wrestlers,” pp. 11–43, esp. p. 19. Insofar as The Met’s
Study of a Nude Man recalls the
Borghese Gladiator (see n. 2, above), it may be notable with respect to
The Wrestlers that four marble reliefs depicting athletes (Musée du Louvre inv. MR2673–MR2676), including pairs of wrestlers, were incorporated into the
Gladiator’s base in the eighteenth century by the Italian sculptor Agostino Penna (d. 1800).
[11] Frédérique Giess, email to the author, September 26, 2020.
[12] See
Collection de M. J. Gilbert, artiste peintre: Verre, Bronzes, Terre cuite, Ivoire: Antiquités recueillies en Syrie, sale catalogue, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, January 23–24, 1903, p. [2].
[13] One of the two objects that Gilbert sold to the Louvre is a ring described as “anneau, trouvé en Syrie,” inv. no. untraced; the other is a stone head, inv. AO 3748. Two other objects, which passed through Gilbert’s 1903 collection sale, are now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore: one of these was acquired from Kelekian. The author thanks Yelena Rakic and Anne Elizabeth Dunn-Vaturi for providing the present whereabouts of these objects, since the provenance of these or other antiquities formerly owned by Gilbert may lead to additional biographical information that links him to Courbet.
