Gustave Courbet was quite simply one of the most influential artists of the 19th century. He had no interest in history painting, portraiture of heads of state, or exotic subject matter, for he believed that the artist should be realistic and paint everyday events involving ordinary people. He was a French artist who has been regarded as the father of the Realist movement.
Courbet, (Jean Desire) Gustave (1819-1877), influential and prolific French painter, who with his compatriots Honoré Daumier and Jean François Millet, founded the mid-19th-century art move…