The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art April 1962 [antikvár]

GUSTAVE COURBET Madame Boreau cover: Madame Boreau (La Dame au Chapeau Noir), oil on canvas, 31% x 24% inches, painted in 1863. Gustave Courbet, French, 1819-1877. Purchase, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Bequest. 62.2 The BULLETIN of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Volume 49, Number 4. April 1962. Published monlhly, excepting July and August, by The Cleveland Museum of Art, 11150 East Boulevard at University Circle, Cleveland 6, Ohio. Subscription included in membership fee, otherwise $3.00 per year. Single copies, 35 cents, except May number. Copyright. 1962. by The Cleveland Museum of Art. Second-class postage paid at Cleveland, Ohio. Museum photography by Richard F. Godfrey; design and typography by Merald E. Wrolstad. Beautiful women with flowers have long been irresistible subjects to poets and painters. Their images vary from the divine to the wicked, from deity to the femme fatale. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first to combine both aspects (Fig. 1), while Courbet preferred to imply neither. He painted what he saw. He painted Mme. Boreau not as Flora, Phryne, Leda, Venus, or Eve as his contemporary Paul Baudry would have, but as a woman of flesh and blood. Mme. Boreau was a native Wallonnese. She must have reminded Courbet of the women of the Franche-Comté where he was born in 1819 as the oldest child of a rich land owner. He liked their well-built, placid physiognomies, their high cheeks, and their prominent, straight-ridged noses. Gustave Courbet met Mme. Boreau in the Sain-tonge in the summer of 1862. He painted her four times as far as is known (Cover,^ Fig. 2, and Fig. 3; a fourth version belongs to the Musée National des Beaux-Arts d'Alger-). One of his admirers^ had invited him to spend the summer at his Chateau Rochemont near Saintes in the Saintonge. It was a magnificent summer with opulent parties, a sequence of ephemeral love afliairs, the companionship of other master painters (among them Corot), and above all, walks through the country. The harvest of the ten months in Saintes and the nearby Port-Berteaud was sixty canvases, including flower pieces, landscapes, and portraits which rank among the best of his work. By comparison, Mme. Boreau looks considerably younger in the other three versions than in the one recently purchased from the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Bequest for the Museum's collection of French nineteenth-century paintings. It seems that this was the latest of the four, done towards the end of his stay in the Saintonge, probably in March 1863. It must have pleased the master because he submitted it to the Salon in May 1863 where it was accepted.^ Today's viewer will find it hard to believe that his nineteenth-century counterpart dismissed Madame Boreau (La Dame au Cbapeau Noir) as unpermis-sibly ugly. "The public was in love with its own image,"'' complained Baudelaire—at least with what it longed, fancied, and dreamed to be. Courbet's concept of truth was rejected because it included both the beautiful and the ugly. Worse still, he was suspected of giving preference to ugliness.