The Painter’s Studio

A whole society sorted into one room, with the painter dead-center — and a subtitle that calls itself, on purpose, a “real allegory.”

1. 1
   The painter, painting the wrong thing

   Dead center — the seated man at the easel

   Courbet sits at his easel in the exact middle of the canvas, palette in hand, and the picture he is working on is not a portrait or a Bible scene but a plain green river landscape — a view of the Loue valley back home near Ornans. He is showing you what Realism does: turns its back on the whole theatrical room of human society behind him and paints the unremarkable real world instead. The self-portrait that runs the painting has the painter looking away from almost everyone in it.
2. 2
   A nude with nowhere to be

   Just behind Courbet, standing — the pale figure with a white sheet

   A naked model stands at Courbet’s shoulder, a white drapery slipping down her hip to the floor. The joke is that she has no job here: he is painting a landscape, so she is a model with nothing to model for — the academic nude (the idealized naked body the official schools drilled endlessly) standing idle behind a painter who would rather paint a riverbank. She is the old kind of subject, watching the new kind get made.
3. 3
   The only one really looking

   At the foot of the easel — the small boy in a smock

   A small peasant boy in a pale smock stands right at the easel, head tipped back, watching the landscape appear. In a room of forty adults posing, networking, reading, brooding, the child is the one figure giving the act of painting his whole open attention — the unschooled eye, the viewer Courbet actually wants.
4. 4
   The cat that doesn’t care

   On the floor near Courbet’s feet, center-low

   A white cat crouches on the bare floor by the painter’s feet, attending to nothing. It is the same flick of nerve as the bored dog in A Burial at Ornans (which has its own read in this app): a small indifferent animal dropped into a solemn, self-important scene, quietly refusing to be impressed by any of it.
5. 5
   Baudelaire, reading in the corner

   Far right edge, bent over a large book

   At the extreme right, almost falling off the canvas, a man sits hunched over a big open book, absorbed, ignoring the whole gathering. That is the poet Charles Baudelaire, copied from a portrait Courbet had painted of him in 1847 — the “shareholders” side’s patron saint, present but lost in his reading, the way poets are.
6. 6
   The wide-hatted poacher (the Emperor?)

   Left foreground — the seated man in a broad hat with hunting dogs

   Over on the dark left side sits a man in a broad-brimmed hat with hunting dogs at his feet, dressed as a poacher. Many readers, then and since, take him for Napoleon III — France’s emperor — slipped in among “the people who live off death,” identified by the hunting dogs and the curled moustache. Courbet’s own letter never names him, and X-rays show the figure was reworked later, so treat the imperial reading as the famous interpretation it is, not a caption Courbet signed.
7. 7
   Cast-offs on the studio floor

   Lower-left foreground, on the bare boards

   Scattered on the floor at the bottom-left lie a guitar, a dagger, and a plumed cavalier’s hat — the dressing-up box of Romanticism (the swashbuckling, exotic, high-drama painting Courbet was burying). Tossed aside on the boards of the “real” world, they read as the discarded props of the kind of art he refused to make.
8. 8
   The crucified mannequin

   Up in the shadows on the dark left side, behind the standing figures

   Strung up in the gloom on the left hangs a lay figure — an artist’s mannequin, the jointed, stuffed studio dummy academic painters draped and posed in place of a living body. Courbet has trussed his with the arms wrenched back so it reads unmistakably as a body on a cross. A crucified dummy, pinned up on the side of the room he gave to misery and the dead: the death of academic art itself, the lifeless stand-in for the real body nailed up in the shadows while the new kind of painting happens, alive, in the light at the center.