By the middle of the nineteenth century material and industrial progress was being directly reflected in the works of writers and painters. Mechanization brought an ever growing interest in the physical nature of things and in the problem of man against the world. The great developments in science were now paralleled by a concern with the new social and philosophical problems. In art there appeared a mass of works which, though still concerned with the fate of individual man, were increasingly aware of physical environment. There is less tendency to idealize in the manner of the neoclassicism or glamorize and dramatize like the Romantics. By the 1850's neither sculpturesque figures of ancient times nor picturesque Algerians or Shakespearean characters were adequate for the needs of this new period.

Courbet was one of the most outspoken defenders of the Realistic attitude in painting. The son of a well-to-do provincial family, he came to Paris in 1839 to study art. His early work in the big city, most of it without formal teaching, was Romantic. Monk in a Cloister, Ruins by a Lake, and Despair indicate that he was a man of the time.

Realistic painting in France began to come into its own after the 1848 Revolution. Courbet's contribution was in two works rather unusual for that time: The Stone Breakers and After Dinner at Ornans. The first is an ordinary scene of two country folk breaking stones for road mending. The dark colored and deliberately commonplace treatment annoyed both Classicists and Romantics but it remained the basis of his approach. The After Dinner at Ornans has an atmospheric mood and a feeling of suspended animation that go back to Louis Le Nain in the seventeenth century. This interest in-mood is the other side of Courbet's personality as an artist.

In his vehement insistence on the right of the individual to say and do what he liked, Courbet remained basically a Romantic. His refusal to paint anything he could not see is an equally dogmatic assertion of his own importance. (It recalls Caravaggio tying wings on his angel models.) His great egotism is further shown in his love for painting himself. Everywhere possible he inserts his own face and figure, not merely as an incidental character but as the center of attention. His formal self-portraits, such as the one in the Louvre, are among the century's most persuasive expositions of the importance of the individual.

In this regard Courbet's self-estimates are considerably different from those of artists like Titian and Rembrandt. These men were concerned with the presentation of a dignified individual or with a philosophical viewpoint. Courbet, on the other hand, is interested in the projection of his own personality in the typical Romantic fashion of Byron, Chopin, and Delacroix. But he is far more self-conscious and aggressive in the social and materialistic sense than any of the others. Wherever Courbet shows his own face, it is with a self-assertive independence. Here this emerges from the tilt of the head, the angle of the hands and the violent twist of the shoulders. Technically it is still dependent on the seventeenth century: Caravaggio, Frans Hals, and other great realists of that epoch.

In Courbet's time it was considered "advanced" to assert that the artist had the right to paint anything he wanted, no matter how ordinary. Pictures like The Stone Breakers or the famous Burial at Ornans, with its everyday and non sacred presentation of various types of people at a small town funeral, earned for Courbet the title "Realist." In the Paris of the 1850's and 1860's this was as damning as being called a Socialist.

To a classically inclined public, pictures like the Young Bather were very annoying. Today its mixture of the pastoral and the sensual has a pleasant, if not overwhelming quality. For the spectators of 1866, it was an affront to their sense of propriety. Instead of the conventional slick, slim, and beautifully proportioned neoclassical nude that has nothing to do with reality, Courbet tried to portray what he saw. He presented a plump, realistically bulging young creature. Not conventional linear continuity and ideal proportion but rather the sheer physical appeal of the form, and its touch qualities is accentuated. The shape of individual parts and the surface handling of the skin with its slightly oily quality convey a visual response.

One might say that Courbet treated the nude not only in an unglamorous fashion, but almost as a piece of still life. Yet, since he is an emotional human being, even this young woman emerges with a somewhat sentimental and pastoral air. As she leans forward to put her toe in the water, the left arm extends along the branch and gives the body an attractive curve following the shape of the landscape background.

Courbet's contribution lay in turning people's minds toward the material at a time when they were still hemmed in by either Classical artificiality or Romantic exaggeration. His aggressive attitude and leadership made it clear that the independent artist was an important social entity with a right to free expression.