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GUSTAVE COURBET
The Meeting or Good-day Monsieur Courbet (1854)
Oil on canvas, 129cm X 149cm/57in X 58 3/4 in

Leader of the Realist movement in painting, Courbet brought new meaning to a style which, during the 1830s and 1840s, had given a rustic and charming view of rural life to the Parisian public. Not only was his class-conscious subject matter alien to both public and critics, but his uncompromising and vigorous painting technique, evolved specially to treat rural themes, was highly innovative. Courbet's sub-ject matter was largely autobiographical. immortalizing the common people, the middle and labouring classes of his provincial home town.
Monet recalled that Courbet 'always painted upon a sombre base, on a canvas prepared with brown'. This statement, however, is deceptive. While Courbet used earth-colored grounds for his largest works, for smaller pictures he bought commercially available, ready-primed canvases with pale grounds and. when the ground did not suit his requirements, he simply added his own. In some of Courbet's works, especially the seascapes, where a dark ground was used under a thin paint layer. increasing transparency of the latter has allowed the ground to dominate and darken the original effect.

Courbet's robust paint surfaces echo the subject matter of his pictures
and his frequent choice of shallow pictorial space was complemented handling. He was renowned for his dexterity with a palette knife with which he applied thin skins of opaque color that snagged previous layers, producing a delicately, color-modulated surface. The appli-cation of paint with a knife draws the oil binder to the surface and, while susceptible to yellowing with age, the technique gives a smooth buttery look unobtainable by other means. Courbet contrasted knifework with textured brushwork, which he often reserved for flesh, fabric and hair. Other methods, like dabbing color with a rag to create the texture of foliage, were also used.
Courbet's sombre, predominantly tonal handling gave his landscapes the browns of studio shadows, imposing the chiaroscuro of interiors even on his outdoor studies. His late seascapes, however, show a move towards the cool blue shadows and diffuse light which are associated with natural atmospheric contrasts and effects.

In this painting, Courbet's practice of lay ing in a dark ground over the pale commercial priming has been abandoned to convey the luminosity of the bright, Southern light. A variety of techniques evoke form and texture; dragged layers of knife-work, wet-in-wet, and color dabbed on with a rag. The paint layer is varied in thickness, but uniformly opaque, with white lightening a subdued palette dominated by earths, black, viridian, mixed greens, and blue, probably cobalt. Concentrating on the figures, Courbet worked from dark to light and shadow to highlights, with constant adjustments to both.

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