The Bohemian and Her Children
La Bohémienne et ses Enfants is an important painting by Gustave Courbet, sold by Nicholas Hall to a private collector.
Provenance
Dr. Edouard Ordinaire, Maizières, France, acquired directly from the artist
Zoé Ordinaire, his wife
Maurice Ordinaire, acquired from the above
By descent until 2001
with Jan Krugier, Geneva
New York, Christie’s, 19th Century European Art, 28 April 2015, lot 11
Private collection, New York
with Nicholas Hall, by 2020
Acquired by a private collector from the above
Exhibitions
On loan to Ornans, Musée Courbet, 2009-2010
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, A Dream of Modern Art, 1 September 2010 – 25 February 2011
Paris, Grand Palais, Bohèmes de Léonard de Vinci à Picasso, 26 September 2012 – 14 January 2013
Madrid, Fundación Mapfre, Luces de Bohemia. Artistas, gitanos y la definición del mundo moderno, 6 February – 5 May 2013
Ornans, Musée Courbet, Courbet/ Picasso – Révolutions, 1 July 2021 – 18 October 2021
Bibliography
Petra T-D. Chu, “Courbet’s Unpainted Pictures” in Arts Magazine, 1980, vol. 55, pp. 134-41.
Petra T-D. Chu, ed. and trans., Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, “Letter 53-7: To Francis Wey,” p. 118, and “Letter 54-1: To Alfred Bruyas,” p. 121.
Petra T-D. Chu, ed., Correspondance de Courbet, Paris, 1996, pp. 110-111, 113.
Ségolène Le Men, Courbet, Paris, 2007, pp. 176-177, reproduced, fig. 140.
Max Hollein and Klaus Herding, ed., A Dream of Modern Art, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Frankfurt, 2011, exh. cat. no. 36, reproduced, p.166.
Florence Hudiwicz, Bohèmes de Léonard de Vinci à Picasso, Grand Palais, Paris, 2012, exh. cat. no. 39, reproduced, p.180.
Frédéric Künzi, Gustave Courbet 1817-1877: sur les sentiers de l’exil, Lausanne, 2012, pp.24-25, reproduced, fig. 11.
Sylvain Amic and Pablo Jimenez Burillo, eds., Luces de Bohemia. Artistas, gitanos y la definición del mundo moderno, Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, 2013, exh. cat. no. 18, reproduced, p.118.
Yves Sarfati, Transferts de Courbet, Paris, 2013, pp. 123-128, reproduced, pl. 4 and pl. 8.
Essay
One of the most important artists of the nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet (1811-1877) is best known for paintings that presented an unabashed view of the French peasantry and working classes. Over the course of his life, Courbet established himself as the model of the modern, avant-garde artist, challenging the dominant academic and Romantic traditions through both his work and his outsized personality.
Courbet was born to a well-to-do family in Ornans, France, near the border with Switzerland, far from Paris, the center of the French and European art world. In 1839 he moved to Paris, where he proceeded to work in the studios of a several prominent academic painters. Rather than following the prescribed academic path, Courbet spent much of his time in the early 1840s studying and copying artworks in the Louvre. During the 1840s, he proceeded to distinguish himself and his work from the dominant artistic movement of Romanticism, epitomized in the art and persona of Eugène Delacroix. In contrast to the refined and sophisticated Delacroix, Courbet self-consciously embraced his rural background. Despite coming from a modestly wealthy family, he often presented himself in country attire with long, unkempt hair. Delacroix’s art was defined by literary and orientalist subject matter and themes, which he rendered in an energetic, painterly facture using dramatic colors. By contrast, Courbet embraced the rich earth tones of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance and Baroque painters of rural life and he depicted contemporary workers and daily life with aggressive realism.
At the 1850-1851 Paris Salon, Courbet caused an uproar when he exhibited several works set in his native Ornans, including his famous paintings Les Casseurs de Pierre (The Stonebreakers), 1849, and Un enterrement à Ornans (A Burial at Ornans), 1849-1850, two history-painting sized canvases that depict the grueling quotidian labors of two rural peasants and a ceremonial burial, respectively. While the peasant and working classes had been depicted in genre scenes for centuries, Courbet was one of the first artists to represent them in an unidealized, unheroized manner. Instead of noble figures content with their meager conditions, his honest depictions of laborers hunched over doing back-breaking work, ruddy-faced townsfolk, and unembellished itinerant wanderers thrust the conditions of the lower economic and social classes into the consciousness of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Against the backdrop of Napoleon III’s suspension of the democratic institutions of the French Second Republic in 1851, Courbet’s works were perceived as a gesture of solidarity with the peasantry and the revolutionary factions within French society. As art historian T.J. Clark notes: “Courbet was not a painter of conflict or even of movement. He gave us images of massive and stifling stillness, images which exposed the structure of his society rather than its disruption.”[1]
As with his contemporaries Jean-Françoise Millet and Honoré Daumier, Courbet’s style and choice of subject matter led to him being called a “Realist,” a title he never fully embraced. Nevertheless, Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto on the occasion of an independent solo exhibition of his work that he held in 1855, an exhibition he organized in response to several of his works being rejected by the juries of that year’s great Salon and Exposition Universelle. “The title Realist was thrust upon me,” wrote Courbet, “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…. To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea. To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearances of my epoch, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create a living art—this is my goal.”[2] Courbet’s oeuvre looks back to the social realism of the Le Nain brothers and precedes the paintings of the modern titan Picasso and the early works of Van Gogh.
La Bohémienne et ses enfants is a significant work that Courbet began in late 1853. At an advanced stage in the work’s creation, Courbet left it in the care of his friend and neighbor Dr. Edouard Ordinaire to make space in his studio to work on his monumental painting L’Atelier du peintre (The Painter’s Studio), 1854-1855 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Toward the end of his life, due to his participation in the activities of the Paris Commune in 1871, Courbet went into exile in Switzerland. Before departing, it is likely that Courbet asked friends and sympathizers who were holding onto his works to hide them so that they would not be confiscated by the state. La Bohémienne et ses enfants was forgotten for generations, but remained within the Ordinaire family’s home. Upon its rediscovery in 2001, it was taken to the Musée Courbet in Ornans where Sara Faunce, then director of the museum, and Jean-Jacques Fernier, specialist and son of Robert Fernier, the cataloguer of Courbet’s works, authenticated the work.
The painting depicts a gypsy mother and her children walking the countryside. Courbet considered the work part of his “highway” series, a group of works depicting itinerant peasants and workers traveling on countryside roads or working, which includes Les Casseurs de Pierre, Le Paysans de Flagey Revenant de la Foire (The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, 1851; Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, France), and La rencontre ou Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1854; Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France). Courbet mentions La Bohémienne in letters from the time, referring to it as “a sequel to the Stonebreakers.” Describing the work, art historians Klaus Herding and Ségolène Le Men write: “Beneath a faded evening sky, with clouds changing from cool blue to grayish brown, we see a strange parade: a young mother, whose youngest child peers out of the oversize rucksack on her back; the child’s sister, who seems to be calling something to the little one; and the older brother, who has to take the place of the father and is therefore dressed more like an adult. On his back he carries a barrel organ and, on his shoulder, a little monkey, which collects the donations after the musical performance. The turbulent sky and the long shadows on the stony ground underscore the insecurity of the homeless family’s situation.” On Courbet’s interest in gypsies, Herding and Le Men note: “Courbet was also emotionally concerned about the lot of these nomadic minorities, who were considered dangerous by the ‘orderly,’ settled classes. The feelings here, however, are also ambivalent: although the boy on the left seems depressed, the faces of the woman and the younger children display a touch of hope.” (K. Herding, op. cit., p. 116)❖