This 22 foot long canvas situated in a main room at the Musee d'Orsay buries the viewer as if he or she were in a cave. Instead of being completely reliant on the state-run Salon system, Courbet pioneered the solo retrospective as a private commercial venture, an approach that many later renegade artists followed.Such stylistic innovations made him greatly admired by later modernists that promoted liberated compositions and amplified surface texture. At times he also abandoned careful modeling in favor of applying paint thickly in broken flecks and slabs.

In the process of clearing away the rhetoric of Academy painting, Courbet often settled on compositions that seemed collaged and crude to prevailing sensibilities.His art was not overtly political, but in the context of the time, he was not ignored as he expressed ideas of equality by heroicizing ordinary individuals, painting them at great scale and refusing to hide their imperfections. This was characteristic of his left-wing commitments. During the Paris Commune of 1871, Courbet briefly abandoned painting for a role in government.He rejected Classical or Romantic treatments and instead took humble scenes of country life - subjects usually considered the stuff of minor genre painting - and made them material for great history painting.

But in his own realm of art, he was most inspired by his distaste for strictures of the French Academy.

Courbet's Realism can be understood as part of the wider inquiry into the physical world that occupied science in the 19 th century.

Gustave Courbet by Lacey Belinda Smith