Dali House

Gustave Courbet’s “La Trombe” from 1867

Gustave Courbet came from Ornans, lodged thick in the hills of eastern France against the Swiss border, and after that toiled in Paris. He was 22 before he first laid eyes on the sea, but it grabbed him, as it will. He became a shoreline junkie.

In 1867, when Courbet was 58 and famous, his neighbourhood pharmacist, Monsieur Fourquet, invited him along to his summer house at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer on the Norman coast, spotted above on Google Earth.

Gustave and Zelie, one of the artist’s three sisters who’d long been his models, stayed for 10 days beginning on August 24. The other sisters, Zoe and Juliette, were left behind in sweltering Paris to keep an eye on his latest exhibition.

From the rise above the beach, Courbet painted “La Trombe” (”The Waterspout”), seen above.

And here, “La Plage de Saint-Aubin”, which has “1867″ written right on it but, according to at least one art historian, was done in 1865. Why Sarah Faunce thinks so, I don’t know, but she argues that Courbet often didn’t sign and date his work until it left his studio, and that was often a year or two after the painting was finished. In 2005 this piece sold at auction for $307,000.

In Trouville in 1865, another tide-minding village on the English Channel, Courbet had painted “Portrait of Countess Karoly”, a vacationing Hungarian royal. It was such a hit that visitors to the “splendid” seaview apartment that the local casino loaned him wouldn’t let him get on with his job.

“More than 400 ladies” came to see the “princess”, he wrote home (and perhaps to compare noses). They also offered him plenty more work — everyone now wanted her portrait done too, at 1,500 francs a pop. “I’ll paint another two or three to satisfy those who are most anxious.”

To be sure, noted travel journalist Adolphe Joanne, Trouville was “the meeting place of the sick who are perfectly healthy, it is Paris transported for two or three months to the sea coast, with its qualities, its absurdities and its vices … It is sad to say that most of the women go there to parade a senseless luxury.”

An aerial of Trouville showing the casino, the large building, still on the spin.

Also sweating it out back in Paris, his soon-to-be-former friend Jules Fleury-Husson — the art critic signed Champfleury — was moaning that Courbet had “lost his way” and was by now merely “trying to please”. Huge bodies of water do have a way of mellowing people out.

To be sure, the great masterpieces and the scandals they provoked were long behind Courbet. “After Dinner at Ornans” was two decades in the past, “Funeral at Ornans” was 1850, and “The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet” 1854.

The impact of “The Bathers” had worn off soon after a snippy Napoleon III whacked it with his riding crop in 1853, as had the grandiose unveiling of “The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up My Seven Years as an Artist” in 1855. “Origin of the World”, his gynaecological study from 1866, was squirreled away in some lusty sultan’s palace.

So, no longer Europe’s most radical artist, Courbet had gone to fashionable Trouville “for three days and stayed for three months”, as he put it, dodging the Parisian cholera, bathing in the sea and painting it alongside James Abbott McNeil Whistler — and getting over his constipation to boot. (This sort of factoid is why artists’ letters are archived for posterity, or possibly posteriority. You can see some of Courbet’s correspondence here courtesy of Google Books.)

Trouville reminded him why he’d fallen in love with the sea on first sight, at age 22 on a visit to nearby Le Havre. “We have at last seen the horizonless sea,” he wrote to his parents. “How strange it is for a valley dweller. You feel as if you are carried away; you want to take and see the whole world.”

Decades later Trouville still charmed him, though in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, “The countryside is not very beautiful,” he wrote his sisters. “As for the beach, it is nothing special … a bit far and bare”.

As for the surf, it’s reportedly calmer there than elsewhere along the coast, but Courbet was in Saint-Aubin long enough to see storms churn it. If he wasn’t such a stickler about realism, metaphor might be read into his “landscapes of the sea”, the turbulence a signal of the political upheavals of the era, which would soon sweep him up.

Symbolism would be nice. Even Courbet said of the sea, in a letter to Victor Hugo in 1864, “In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”

And Paul Cezanne would one day say that a Courbet wave “seems to hit you full in the chest, you stagger back, the whole room reeks of sea spray.”

Ultimately Courbet had the call, however, and he insisted that he always painted real life just the way it was.

“Do not expect a symbolic work,” Emile Zola agreed in a Salon review. “Courbet has simply painted a wave.”

“La Trombe”, the painting at the top of this post and seen a bit more closely below, was done that summer of 1867. Sotheby’s sold it last month for $566,500. That’s real money!

Interestingly, Courbet has again placed a human figure in the midst of grand nature, as he did years earlier in his far more famous “Seacoast at Palavas”, only this time it’s a woman. In the 1854 painting, done at what is now called Palavas-les-Flots on the Mediterranean coast, the figure was almost certainly him, although many people argue it’s his friend Alfred Bruyas.

If it’s Courbet on the beach at Palavas, it certainly makes for a more interesting storyline. There he was, at the top of his game, “the most arrogant man in France”, to use his own assessment. “Oh, sea!” he claimed to have taunted the Mediterranean, “your voice is tremendous, but it will never succeed in drowning out the voice of fame as it shouts my name to the whole world!”

It was another measure of the strident, independent rebel who honoured few people besides himself and left history no fewer than 20 self-portraits, including the wild-eyed Johnny Deppe of “Despair” from a decade earlier and the cocky one shown here (a close-up), “Self-portrait with Pipe”, from about 1849.

“Seacoast at Palavas” — which also goes by the titles “The Artist on the Seashore at Palavas”, “The Edge of the Sea at Palavas”, “The Sea at Palavas” and “The Beach at Palavas” and is now at the National Gallery of Australia — was the exuberant result of finally seeing the briny expanse again for the first time in too long a while, on a sidetrip from an 1854 visit to Bruyas’ home in Montpellier, which is in turn not far from storied Avignon and Arles.

Palavas in 1997 opened the Art Gallery Gustave Courbet on Quai Clemenceau, which the town’s website seems to suggest is where Courbet did indeed have his lodgings, “in the extension of the casino”. He evidently did well by seashore casinos. But it’s Montpellier that has the Musée Fabre, where the self-portrait with the pipe hangs.

There’s also the Courbet Walk, on which seven stelas mark scenes he painted in Montpellier and Pavalas.

In 1865 Whistler offered a different Courbet of the coast, a view from Trouville that he titled “Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville”, no doubt to drag the viewer’s intention away from the subject matter and into the technique, just as he did with his mother’s portrait (see this post). Here’s a close-up of “Harmony”, now at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum:

Whistler didn’t see a fiery rebel mocking Neptune, but a mere human all but faded into the circumstances of his existence. And so it was quickly becoming with Gustave Courbet. Within six years he allowed himself to be drawn into the experimental mud of the Paris Commune, and the handwriting of doom was on the wall.

In the spring of 1871 Courbet was part of the bureaucracy and basically in charge of art in the capital. Soon after the authorities’ hammer came down on the Commune late in May, he was arrested, flagellated in the court of public opinion, chained up and led through the streets to prison. It wasn’t the picnic that his admirer Claude Monet had invited him to for “Le dejeuner sur l’herbe” half a decade earlier, as seen in the detail below.

On Courbet’s release the following year he was put through the legal wringer again. He had ordered the relocation of the “artless” Vendôme Column, the monument to the war-mongering Napoleon I, and ended up stuck with the bill for moving it. Rather than pay, he bolted to Switzerland, choosing La Tour-de-Peilz on the shore of Lake Geneva, a body of water that’s vast, but hardly sea-vast.

Amid pictures of funereal bouquets and trout dead on life’s cruel hooks, Courbet lasted another four dreary years in exile, running a studio of underlings who did all the painting for him so that he could sink ingloriously into a lake of brandy and absinthe. The booze was his coffin: he dropped dead of dropsy on December 31, 1877.

Waves never stop, nor the ripples caused by Courbet’s cagily inventive wrestling bouts with nature — and the nature of man.

“The Shore at Trouville: Sunset Effect” is at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. A closer look below:

“Paysage de la mer”, circa 1870, sold by the Manton Family Foundation in 2008 for $62,000, not what Christie’s was hoping for.

In 1869 Courbet sampled another Normandy resort, Etretat, where tall, brine-bored cliffs added to the aesthetic allure. There were more leaping waves than at Trouville, too.

He occupied the house of one of Guy de Maupassant’s relatives and whipped out 20 canvases (or 29, depending on who’s talking). “Did I earn my bread and butter in Etretat!” he boasted. Christie’s sold one of them, “La vague” (”The Wave”), for $574,500 in 1998. Some bread and butter!

There are many Courbet paintings called “The Wave” in different languages. The one above belongs to the Oskar Reinhart Collection at the Am Römerholz museum in Winterthur, Switzerland.

De Maupassant went to see him, and years later recalled his impressions of the proto-impressionist: “In a huge, empty room, a fat, dirty, greasy man was slapping white paint on a blank canvas with a kitchen knife. From time to time he would press his face against the window and look out at the storm.

“The sea came so close that it seemed to batter the house and completely envelope it in its foam and roar. The salty water beat against the windowpanes like hail, and ran down the walls. On his mantelpiece was a bottle of cider next to a half-filled glass. Now and then, Courbet would take a few swigs, and then return to his work. This work became ‘The Wave’, and caused quite a sensation around the world.”

Below, more of Courbet’s paysages de mer.

“The Calm Sea” from 1869, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

“The Wave”, 1870, at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin

“The Wave”, 1870, at the Phoenix Art Museum

“The Wave”, circa 1871, at the National Gallery of Scotland

There’s another rollicking “Wave” from 1870 at the Musée Orsay, where it’s alternatively titled “The Stormy Sea”, but they’ve let the photographer put his copyright on the online image! Well, that certainly keeps me from stealing it — and admiring it.