Few great artists have been so little influenced by their great
forerunners as Courbet was. A man of strong peasant instincts, of
incomparable forcefulness and initiative, he looked at the works of the
great romanticists of his time and laughed with a titantic contempt. He
looked at the works of Raphael and Michelangelo and laughed again. Their
power and beauty were nothing to Courbet because they were afraid of the
unvarnished truth. The Spaniards he admired. He was instinctively the
“painter of raw material.” Moreover, he was a truculent propagandist, an
“individualist with strong elbows.”
In his own time, he was a subject of ridicule; but we now know that he was
a great painter as well as a blunt pioneer. His great artistry is
inescabable when we see in such a painting as The Roe Covert, the bold
naturalism of vision, and directness of brushing combined with such a fine
power of harmonizing tones, and through all, such a tender feeling for the
subject. He is as a young savage might be in his element; he can love
Nature without first making romantic literature of her.—Gift of James J.
Hill.
[Woodland Scene. N. V. Diaz de la Pena, 1809-1879]