Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet is a French painter, leader of the Realist movement who rejected Romantic and academic idealization to represent ordinary life with revolutionary frankness. His monumental and provocative work - "A Burial at Ornans", "The Origin of the World", "The Stone Breakers" - celebrates peasants, workers, and landscapes of his native Franche-Comté with powerful palette knife technique and boldness that shocked his contemporaries. Engaged and rebellious artist, he embodies the break with bourgeois pictorial tradition and paves the way for social realism and modern art.