They challenged convention by depicting unidealized peasants and workers, often on a grand scale traditionally reserved for paintings of religious or historical subjects.

[5] Courbet's first works were an Odalisque inspired by the writing of Victor Hugo and a Lélia illustrating George Sand, but he soon abandoned literary influences, choosing instead to base his paintings on observed reality.

[8] The gold medal meant that his works would no longer require jury approval for exhibition at the Salon[9]—an exemption Courbet enjoyed until 1857 (when the rule changed).

[10] In 1849–50, Courbet painted The Stone Breakers (destroyed in the Allied Bombing of Dresden in 1945), which Proudhon admired as an icon of peasant life; it has been called "the first of his great works".

For Courbet realism dealt not with the perfection of line and form, but entailed spontaneous and rough handling of paint, suggesting direct observation by the artist while portraying the irregularities in nature.

The work was based on two men, one young and one old, whom Courbet discovered engaged in backbreaking labor on the side of the road when he returned to Ornans for an eight-month visit in October 1848.

On his inspiration, Courbet told his friends and art critics Francis Wey and Jules Champfleury, "It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting.

The vast painting, measuring 10 by 22 feet (3.0 by 6.7 meters), drew both praise and fierce denunciations from critics and the public, in part because it upset convention by depicting a prosaic ritual on a scale which would previously have been reserved for a religious or royal subject.

"[20] The painting lacks the sentimental rhetoric that was expected in a genre work: Courbet's mourners make no theatrical gestures of grief, and their faces seemed more caricatured than ennobled.

[22] He actively encouraged the public's perception of him as an unschooled peasant, while his ambition, his bold pronouncements to journalists, and his insistence on depicting his own life in his art gave him a reputation for unbridled vanity.

[25]During the 1850s, Courbet painted numerous figurative works using common folk and friends as his subjects, such as Village Damsels (1852), The Wrestlers (1853), The Bathers (1853), The Sleeping Spinner (1853), and The Wheat Sifters (1854).

He displayed forty of his paintings, including The Artist's Studio, in his gallery called The Pavilion of Realism (Pavillon du Réalisme) which was a temporary structure that he erected next door to the official Salon-like Exposition Universelle.

He was admired by the American James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and he became an inspiration to the younger generation of French artists including Édouard Manet and the Impressionist painters.

While Courbet's seascapes, painted during his many visits to the northern coast of France in the late 1860s, were decidedly less controversial than his salon submissions, they furthered his contributions (willing or otherwise) to realism with their emphasis on both the beauty and danger of the natural world.

Without expanding on the greater or lesser accuracy of a name that nobody, I should hope, can really be expected to understand, I will limit myself to a few words of elucidation in order to cut short the misunderstandings.

To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my time, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter but a man as well; in short, to create living art – this is my goal.

These included Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer), depicting two prostitutes under a tree,[33] as well as the first of many hunting scenes Courbet was to paint during the remainder of his life: Hind at Bay in the Snow and The Quarry.

[35] By exhibiting sensational works alongside hunting scenes, of the sort that had brought popular success to the English painter Edwin Landseer, Courbet guaranteed himself "both notoriety and sales".

[36] During the 1860s, Courbet painted a series of increasingly erotic works such as Femme nue couchée, culminating in The Origin of the World (L'Origine du monde) (1866), which depicts female genitalia and was not publicly exhibited until 1988,[37] and Sleep (1866), featuring two women in bed.

[38] Until about 1861, Napoléon's regime had exhibited authoritarian characteristics, using press censorship to prevent the spread of opposition, manipulating elections, and depriving Parliament of the right to free debate or any real power.

Press censorship, too, was relaxed and culminated in the appointment of the Liberal Émile Ollivier, previously a leader of the opposition to Napoléon's regime, as the de facto Prime Minister in 1870.

He wrote a letter to the Government of National Defense, proposing that the column in the Place Vendôme, erected by Napoleon I to honour the victories of the French Army, be taken down.

There were some famous names on the list of members, including André Gill, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Eugène Pottier, Jules Dalou, and Édouard Manet.

Courbet chaired the meeting and proposed that the Louvre and the Musée du Luxembourg, the two major art museums of Paris, closed during the uprising, be reopened as soon as possible and that the traditional annual exhibit called the Salon be held as in years past, but with radical differences.

[51] In his final years, Courbet painted landscapes, including several scenes of water mysteriously emerging from the depths of the earth in the Jura Mountains of the France–Switzerland border.

[54] On 31 December 1877, a day before the first installment was due,[55] Courbet died, aged 58, in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, of a liver disease aggravated by heavy drinking.

Courbet's particular kind of realism influenced many artists to follow, notably among them the German painters of the Leibl circle,[56] James McNeill Whistler, and Paul Cézanne.

[70] Gustav Courbet's paintings Village Girl With Goat, The Father, and Landscape With Rocks were discovered in the Gurlitt Trove of art stashed in Munich.

[74] In March 2023, a museum at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, returned a painting La Ronde Enfantine by Gustave Courbet, which was stolen in 1941 by the Nazis in Paris.

The Spoliation Advisory Panel, a body created in 2000 by the British government, concluded on 28 March "that the painting was stolen by the Nazi occupation forces because Robert Bing was Jewish".