Note 58 — LI.

As a painter Courbet has been very diversely judged. He was the chief of the ultra-realistic school, and therefore a natural subject for the contempt and abuse of the admirers of “legitimate art.” But his later use of the political power entrusted to him has drawn down upon him the wrath of an immense majority of the French public, which his artistic misdemeanours had scarcely touched. On the sixteenth of April he was elected a member of the Commune by the 6th arrondissement of Paris, and forthwith appointed Director of the Beaux Arts. Until this time his life had been purely professional, and consequently of mediocre interest for the general public. He was born at Ornans, department of the Doubs, in 1819, and received his primary instructions from the Abbé Gousset, afterwards Archbishop of Rheims. He first applied himself to the study of mathematics, painting the while, and apparently aiming at a fusion of both pursuits. He subsequently read for the bar for a short time, and, finally, adopting art as his sole profession, threw himself heart and soul into a Rénaissance movement as the apostle of a new style. The peculiarities of his manner soon brought him into notoriety, and a school of imitators grouped itself around him. His pride became a proverb. In 1870 he was offered the cross of the Legion of Honour, and refused it, arrogantly declaring that he would have none of a distinction given to tradesmen and ministers. The part he took in the destruction of the Colonne Vendôme is familiar to all readers of the English press. Three weeks after the fall of the Commune he was denounced by a Federal officer, and discovered at the house of a friend hiding in a wardrobe, and in September was condemned by the tribunal at Versailles to six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 600 francs—a slight penalty that astonished everyone.