A famous and extraordinary bond linked the collector Alfred Bruyas (1821-1876) and the painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), as shown in the well-known work “Bonjour Monsieur Courbet!” The painting depicts the artist Courbet, his patron Alfred Bruyas, and Bruyas’s manservant, Calas. Courbet the artist, dressed as a wanderer with a pack on his back, a walking stick in one hand and his hat in the other, strides toward his elegantly dressed patron, who waits for him by the roadside together with his servant and hunting dog. The servant, Calas, is also dressed with a certain polish, but bows his head humbly before the esteemed artist.
The work was first shown in 1855 in Paris, at the “Pavilion of Realism” that Courbet opened on the street facing the entrance to the Salon exhibition, as a protest after the Academy’s official exhibition rejected him. The painting was read as a social and artistic manifesto about the artist’s standing in society. Courbet planted several clues to how he saw himself and his role as an artist, and to how he wanted society to treat him. Even the gesture of tipping hats carries a different meaning for each figure: Courbet seems to hold his hat merely out of practicality, while the patron and the servant appear to lift theirs as a mark of respect toward their guest. The critic Edmond About (1828-1885), on seeing the work, gave it the title “Success bows before genius.”
The artist’s patron, Alfred Bruyas, was the one who commissioned the painting. Courbet had accepted Bruyas’s invitation to stay with him for several months at his estate in Montpellier. Courbet apparently arrived from Paris, visible in the distance, and likely met Bruyas and his servant at Lattes, just outside Montpellier. The composition draws on a popular print on the theme of the Wandering Jew, identified by the art historian Linda Nochlin (1931-2017) in her 1963 doctoral thesis, in which the Wandering Jew meets two bourgeois figures in a rural setting. Courbet’s treatment of his own bohemian portrait was shaped in a similar way by the legend of the Wandering Jew, and his identification with it was that of an outsider challenging the usual relationship between an artist and his patron.
To Courbet’s contemporaries, the painting looked almost childish in its composition. There’s no imposing stance to the figures, no bold colors or flowing lines. His depiction of himself as a wanderer surely struck many as scandalous. But that was exactly Courbet’s intention: to shake up the conventions of the bourgeoisie of his day. He portrays himself as the equal of the patron who removes his hat before him. Courbet came from a family of minor nobility that had lost its fortune, but he saw the path he had chosen, art, as something sublime, standing above the patron’s rank. The artist is independent, free in his opinions, and takes orders from no one.
The landscape is flat and open with a low horizon, echoing 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. In Courbet’s work, this device enlarges and emphasizes the figures, outlined against the bright sky. The background seems to offer a “platform” for the figures, and there is no middle ground at all, creating a sudden gap in distance. When the painting was shown at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1855, critics remarked that the artist had presented himself in an extremely arrogant manner. The light in the painting comes from the left. Courbet stands in full sunlight, while the patron and the servant are in the shade cast by a tree that lies outside the open composition. Courbet the realist believed that the highest goal was a faithful reflection of everyday reality without personal involvement. He was the one who gave the Realist movement its name, and his outlook amounted to a revolution in art, since he wanted to be the student of nature alone.
More on Alfred Bruyas
The portrait above is the first of three depictions Courbet made of his patron and correspondent, Alfred Bruyas (1821-1876). Writing to Théophile Silvestre, Courbet explained that the subtitle Tableau-Solution was meant to capture the “affection and perfect accord” he felt toward his new friend and patron, with whom he shared so many ambitions: for Bruyas, it meant finding his place within the art and society of his time; for Courbet, it meant the realization of a spiritual and financial partnership. In 1855, their collaboration led to the Pavilion of Realism, Courbet’s famous solo exhibition, now regarded as a historic landmark of 19th-century art.
Alfred Bruyas, a young man from a well-known Montpellier family, was determined to promote modern art and painting. He commissioned several portraits of himself from artists of his time, including Alexandre Cabanel, Thomas Couture, Eugène Delacroix and others. Bruyas was influenced by the vision of social reform put forward by the followers of Charles Fourier in the early 19th century, and he embraced Courbet’s idealistic view of the social mission of art (he donated his art collection to the Musée Fabre in 1868). He greatly admired Courbet’s work shown at the 1853 Salon, and singled out “The Bathers,” which caused a scandal at the exhibition, as an example of “free art.” A meeting with the artist, and a commission for this portrait, soon followed.
The painting was made in Courbet’s studio on Rue Hautefeuille in late spring 1853, and it combines a traditional portrait style with a careful depiction of Bruyas and his restrained yet unmistakable taste for ornament. Of particular significance is the volume inscribed “Studies of Modern Art Solution A. Bruyas” in the lower right corner.
Gustave Courbet changed the audience…
Courbet’s origins in the Jura mountains, a region bordering Switzerland, were the emotional starting point for his critique of modern civilization. By declaring the freedom of the mountain dweller with the mountains as his fortress, he positioned himself as a regionalist against the centralizing government, as a man of the countryside against the polished codes of the city, and as a successor to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon against the urbanization of modern industrial society.
John Berger (1926-2017) wrote in “Ways of Seeing” that Courbet’s innovation came from addressing an entirely new audience: he didn’t change painting, he changed the audience. This work is characteristic of the 19th century, a century in which socialist theories of equality and brotherhood were on the rise. Courbet was also friends with the French politician, socialist and thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), whose worldview captivated Courbet, much as it captivated the young revolutionaries gathering in Paris at the time, Karl Marx (1818-1883) among them. Proudhon believed that a man is not free when he depends on others for his work and his wages, and that the existing system of laws would be replaced by shared, agreed-upon principles, bringing with them freedom, equality and cooperation (it’s a shame he was also quite the misanthrope, an antisemite who despised Jews and Protestants alike). Courbet painted Proudhon and his daughters in 1853. The work was completed in 1865.
Berger John, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972
Faunce Sara, Courbet reconstructed, Yale University Press, 1988
Nochlin Linda, The Jew in the text: modernity and the construction of identity, Thames and Hudson c.1995
Nochlin Linda, Realism and tradition in art 1848-1900 sources and document, Prentice Hall c.1966
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