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Lot Essay
The decade between 1840 and 1850 was a transitional period for many young French painters. Courbet, like Jean François Millet, worked in a romantic spirit in the 1840s. Both artists broke with this tradition around 1850 when they each developed their own unique style, styles that would characterize the rest of their careers. Nevertheless, the decade of the 1840s was an interesting time to be a young artist in Paris, and for Courbet, it was a time spent in search of self expression. Courbet's output from this time included twelve self-portraits executed between 1840 and 1848. They form a series in which Courbet assumed various disguises and dramatic postures. He cast himself in such guises as the dashing companion to a pretty young woman, as a wounded man resting by a tree, as a mephistophelian gnome playing a game of draughts and as a sculptor dressed in medieval costume.
Painted in 1845, The Sculptor, also called The Poet, was the pendant to Courbet's 1845 Salon entry, Le Guitarrero (Figure 1), a painting also once believed to be a self-portrait, but now recognized as a portrait of Courbet's boyhood friend, the violinist, Alphonse Promayat. The two paintings may have been conceived by Courbet as a sort of diptych symbolizing the friendship of the two young men from Franche-Comte. Both sitters are depicted in picturesque and fantastic costumes, very much in the spirit of the Troubador style, which was so popular at the time. They are each set in a rocky terrain which is reminiscent of the landscape of Courbet's native Ornans. Hélène
Toussaint (Gustave Courbet, exh. cat., 1977, no. 9) notes that in The Sculptor Courbet painted himself with the emblems of a Masonic apprentice: he is shown sculpting the 'living rock' with a mallet in his right hand and a chisel in his left. Carved in the rock next to him is a woman's head leaning against an amphora from which water is pouring. The connection between water and women is also part of Masonic symbolism. It is not known whether Courbet was in fact a Mason: this was an era in which romantic minds were attracted by secret societies and Courbet may very well have known of the symbolism.
Courbet most likely sold The Sculptor to a Dutch dealer named H.J. Wisselingh, whose portrait he painted in 1846. He wrote the following in a letter to his family dated summer 1845: "Lately I had a visit from a Dutch dealer from Amsterdam who liked my work a lot. He had been making the rounds of the Paris ateliers and he told me that he had not seen anything as much to his liking as what I made. He claims that he will make a name for me in Holland. In the meantime, he has taken two paintings of mine: a small study as big as a hand for which he paid me twenty francs, and another small painting, a pendant of the one I had at the Exhibition, for which he paid me four hundred francs." (P. ten-Doesschate Chu, p. 56).