Gustave Courbet – The Desperate Man: How the Silent Scream of His Youth Became His Harshest Reality

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We are in Geneva, Switzerland, in the fall of 1877 At an exhibition being held by the Geneva National Institute, a small painting hangs as exhibit number 30, and the catalog describes it with a single word. Désespoir, despair.

Anyone who steps in front of the picture sees a face and two raised hands and almost nothing else. A young man with a dark beard stares out of the picture, eyes wide open, digging both hands into his hair.

The painting was submitted by a painter who lives in exile at the other end of Lake Geneva, having fled France four years earlier. All his property there was confiscated and he cannot go back. He is 58 years old and seriously ill. The face in the picture is his own, but more than 30 years younger, because that is how old the painting is. He painted it in Paris when he was about 25, still a young painter there at the very beginning of his career. Now, old and ill, he has once again taken out this picture from his youth and sent it to Geneva under the title Despair.

The painter's name is Gustave Courbet, and the small painting is famous today under a title that closely echoes the word used in the Geneva catalog, The Desperate Man.

The painting is small, roughly 18 inches high and 21 inches wide. A horizontal format that leaves room for the raised arms. Face and hands fill almost the entire canvas. Courbet shows himself head on and at close range, as if through a camera that has moved right up to him. So close that his arms no longer quite fit in the frame. One elbow and the other arm are cut off by the picture's edge. His eyes are wide open, and their whites gleam even though they lie in shadow. The piercing gaze meets you directly, and yet it seems as if this man were looking right through you, as if he were seeing something behind you. It is a gaze that is hard to escape.

He has dug both hands into his dark hair, fingers spread, as if he were about to tear it out. He wears a white painter's smock and a neckerchief, loosely tied, that hangs down past the lower edge of the picture. The garb of the Paris Bohemians, those young artists who were poor but lived by their own rules.

Harsh light falls from the upper left onto his face, so that the pale skin stands out sharply against the dark hair and the dark beard, and the white of the smock glows. The background remains plain. The painting does not show what has shaken this man so deeply, and that is exactly what heightens the picture's tension. The man's agitation is a reaction to something we cannot see, because it lies outside the picture. We see the reaction, but we never see the cause.

The artist who painted this picture came from Ornans, a small town in the Franch Comté in eastern France, near the Swiss border. Gustave Courbet was born there on June 10, 1819, the son of a well-to-do landowner. His father had a respectable profession in mind for him. He was to become a lawyer.

So, in 1839, the 20-year-old went to Paris to study law, but soon gave up his studies. Painting had been his passion since childhood. As a student in Besson-Saint, the nearest big city, he had taken drawing lessons from a painter alongside his schoolwork, and in Paris, what drew him now was not the lecture halls, but the painter's studios. He chose not to attend the State Art Academy, the usual path for an aspiring painter. Instead, he went to private studios, where young artists could draw from the live model for little money, and above all, to the Louvre, which became his true school. There, he copied the old masters, the Spaniards of the 17th century, Diego Velázquez and José de Ribera, and Rembrandt, the great master of Dutch painting. In these painters' work, faces emerge from deep darkness into a hard light. The background sinks into black, and only what the light strikes, a forehead, a hand, a white collar, stands out luminous against it. That is exactly the treatment of light and shadow that inspired him in the Louvre, and that he later applied in his own paintings. Nowhere did he use it as powerfully as in his picture, The Desperate Man.

In those years, however, success was still a long way off. He lived on his family's money, and recognition was scarce. Outwardly, he let none of this show. From the start, Courbet carried himself with a self-confidence that astonished his contemporaries, and he once even called himself the proudest and most arrogant man in France.