Thomas Couture
A Realist
- (1865), oil on canvas
- 14.9 x 18.1 in. (38 x 46 cm.)
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
- 561 x 700 (91 KB)
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Editor’s Note:
[from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam]“This canvas by the French artist Thomas Couture can be interpreted as a satire on Realism. Couture was critical of this new direction in painting, which preferred everyday and even entirely trivial subjects to literary or historical themes. This Realist “lowers” himself to painting the portrait of a pig, the quintessential symbol of stupidity. Inconsequential objects hang on the walls; the painter, seated on a sculpted head of the Greek god Zeus, displays scant regard for classical culture. Couture himself usually painted works whose subjects were somewhat more elevated, in a style more in keeping with the academic tradition.
“Realism in art is an attitude as much as a style. From the mid-19th century, Realist painters rebelled against the art academies and their old-fashioned themes, which seemed increasingly irrelevant in a world newly dominated by science and technology. The Realists reasoned that all meaningful knowledge came from what they could see and directly experience. Instead of depicting aristocrats and myths, they chose ordinary people and events as the subjects of their works. Gustave Courbet, the leader of the movement in art, expressed the Realists’ point of view when he declared that he could not draw an angel because he had never seen one.”
study of a pig's head
- (ca. 1860s ), pencil sketch on paper
- Musée de l'Impératrice, Château de Compiègne
- 600 x 747 (56 KB)
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Editor’s Note:
The date and its similarity to the pig's head in 'The Realist' above suggest this may have been a preparatory sketch.