Toulouse Lautrec Paintings And Gustave Courbet Paintings

By Darren Hartley


Toulouse Lautrec paintings of dancehall performers and prostitutes are personal and humanistic. They reveal the sadness and humor hidden behind rice powders and gaslights. Their influences were long lasting. To say the least, there would be no Andy Warhol, if there was no Lautrec.

One of the early en plein air Toulouse Lautrec paintings was the Streetwalker. The pallid complexion and artificial hair color of his subject, a prostitute named Golden Helmet, clashed with the naturalistic setting of the drawing. Later on his career, Toulouse would devote an entire series of prints, called Elles, to life inside a brothel.

Featuring two of Toulouse's favourite cafe concert stars, Yvette Guilbert and Jane Avril, was one of the Toulouse Lautrec paintings, Divan Japonais. In the poster, Jane was seated in the foreground wearing one of her famously outlandish hats. Toulouse conveyed the essence of their personalities by exaggerating their characteristic features.

Gustave Courbet paintings challenged convention by rendering scenes from daily life on a large scale previously reserved for historical paintings. These works included The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Omans. Omans was Gustave's native village in the Franche-Comte in eastern France and it was where this group of paintings was set.

Gustave painted himself at the center of the universe in one of his Gustave Courbet paintings done in monumental canvas, The Painter's Studio. In the artwork, he was paradoxically painting a landscape within the confines of his studio. In the accompanying catalogue was included his Realist Manifesto, proclaiming his fidelity to subjects drawn from modern life.

It was during the 1850s that Gustave Courbet paintings went beyond the Omans subjects that had established his reputation. Among these paintings was a portrait of actor Louis Gueymard and society portraits on commission. There was the more intimate Jo, La Belle Irlandaise, a fusion of portraiture and genre painting.




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