Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet founded Realism, insisted that painting must depict only what is visible, and was ruined by a political conviction. Born in Ornans in the Franche-Comté in 1819 to prosperous farmers, he went to Paris in 1839, largely taught himself by copying at the Louvre, and never accepted formal academic training. His breakthrough works were shown in 1850-51. A Burial at Ornans is a canvas over six metres wide, the scale reserved for history painting, showing an ordinary village funeral with mourners painted as themselves — a bored beadle, a dog. The Stone Breakers showed two labourers, one too old and one too young for the work, without any moralising. Critics attacked both as ugly and as socialism in paint, which is roughly what he intended: he said he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one. Rejected from the 1855 Exposition Universelle, he built his own pavilion beside it and called it the Pavilion of Realism, the first artist to mount such a protest exhibition. He painted The Origin of the World in 1866, a close view of a woman's torso commissioned privately, which was not publicly exhibited until 1995. He was a committed republican and anarchist, a friend of Proudhon. Under the Paris Commune in 1871 he headed the arts commission and was associated with the demolition of the Vendôme Column, a Napoleonic monument. After the Commune fell he was imprisoned for six months and then charged with the column's cost — over 300,000 francs, payable in annual instalments. He fled to Switzerland in 1873 and died there in 1877, the day before the first instalment was due.

• Lived: 1819 CE – 1877 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter, revolutionary