Gustave Courbet was born in Ornans, France, into a family of successful farmers in the eastern region of Franche-Comté, near the Swiss border. His family encouraged him to study law, but he moved to Paris at the age of twenty to pursue his painting career. Courbet’s first paintings were portraits, genre scenes with several figures, and landscapes in the Romantic style. He then developed his own style, known as Realism, which dealt not with the perfection of line and form in an idealized scene, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, and the suggestion of directly observing the true irregularities in nature.
Courbet was highly political and created several famous works depicting peasants, laborers, and ordinary citizens with underlying messages of governmental reform and revolution. He began to write essays on his socialist ideas which brought him criticism both personally and professionally. He was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his role in the revolutionary activities of the Paris Commune and was fined more than he could pay. He eventually fled to Switzerland, where he died in 1877.
TheGust of Wind depicts a storm rapidly advancing over a stretch of land in a forest. Small, delicate brushstrokes capture the sunlit hills at the horizon and the darkening sky in the background, while the rocky landscape, the pool, and the wind-bent, craggy trees are described with the rough marks of brush and palette knife. The scene in this painting is probably a site in the Forest of Fontainebleau, a vast expanse of virtually untouched forest a short distance from Paris. The Forest of Fontainebleau was a favored subject of a group of mid-19th-century artists who, like Courbet, rejected the classical landscape prescribed by the French Academy and concentrated instead on simple rural images. The inclusion of the mountain range in the background, which does not exist in proximity to the forest, transforms this very realistic landscape into a type of fantasy. This painting is Courbet’s largest canvas devoted solely to landscape.
Courbet rendered The Gust of Wind with extraordinary energy in a variety of strokes and smears. He considered painting a physical challenge and experimented with manipulating textures to create what he saw. Often painting in large scale, Courbet applied paint to the canvas with dramatic gestures and a variety of tools: large and small brushes, a palette knife, rags, and even his thumb. Many of Courbet’s landscapes seem to be roughly finished with visible surface texture, defiant of the smooth style of Academic painting. His spontaneous use of color creates movement and conveys the impression of light flickering over the rocks, of rippling water, and of leaves trembling in the wind. Courbet’s innovative paint application and rough textures inspired generations of artists.
By the late 1850s, landscape painting, a genre that received little respect from the Academy, became Courbet’s favorite subject. He became increasingly dissatisfied with his treatment by art juries and took it upon himself to show his work at his own expense during the World Fairs of 1855 and 1867. When two of Courbet’s major works were rejected from the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he withdrew his other eleven accepted submissions and displayed his paintings privately in his Pavillon du Realisme, not far from the official international exhibition. Even when Courbet lived in self-imposed exile, cut off from family and friends for the last part of his life, he continued to paint landscapes.
