THE '"DENTS DU MIDI" PAINTED BY GUSTAVE COURBET

GUSTAVE COURBET (1819-1877)

 Les Dents du Midi (3,114 m to 3,257 m -10,216 ft to10,685 ft) 

Switzerland 

1. Grand panorama des Alpes, 1877, The Cleveland Museum of Art 

2. Panorama des Alpes, 1876, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève

The painter 

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and the Romanticism of the previous generation of visual artists. His independence set an example that was important to later artists, such as the Impressionists and the Cubists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th-century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social statements through his work.

Courbet's paintings of the late 1840s and early 1850s brought him his first recognition. They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects. Courbet's subsequent paintings were mostly of a less overtly political character: landscapes, seascapes, hunting scenes, nudes and still lifes. He was imprisoned for six months in 1871 for his involvement with the Paris Commune, and lived in exile in Switzerland from 1873 until his death.

Courbet  painted a few mountains in his life : the Juras mountains around Ornans ( France) and a few  mountains in Switzerland during his exil; Like many painters of the 19th Century, Courbet didn't name the mountain he painted; he liked to give a description of the general atmosphere rather than  a precise geographical location.  The painting "Grand panorama des Alpes"  which includes the Dents du Midi mountain, is among the latest paintings he did, during the year he died. An other one shown here is  anterior one year and is is kept in, Geneva in the  MAH (Museum of Art and History).  

 "I am fifty years old and I have always lived in freedom; let me end my life free; when I am dead let this be said of me: 'He belonged to no school, to no church, to no institution, to no academy, least of all to any régime except the régime of liberty."

The mountain 

See  The Dents du midi already posted in this blog