Gustave Courbet's Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a Wandering Jew

Abstract

In his own day, Gustave Courbet was generally considered a painter of reality: his compositions were held to be records of sheer, unmediated observation and were praised or criticized as such by contemporary observers.¹ In more recent years, Courbet's dependence upon traditional art and upon popular imagery in particular has been recognized: such works as the After-Dinner at Ornans, the Burial at Ornans, the Wrestlers, and the Painter's Studio, have been clearly related to specific pictorial antecedents.² Yet one of his major paintings of the decade of the fifties, The Meeting (Fig. 1) of 1854, has continued to be viewed as nothing more than the faithful, if typically egotistical, recording of a specific event in a particular locale: the artist's meeting with his patron, Alfred Bruyas, and the latter's servant and dog, on the road to Sète outside Montpellier.³ The painting has been criticized by Roger Fry for sacrificing “plastic significance for a crude and meaningless verisimilitude to actual objects,”⁴ and a purposeful rejection of all traditional principles of composition has been considered its most striking characteristic.⁵ Indeed, the artist's fidelity to the sheer data of experience has seemed so uncompromising, his procedure in this work has been likened to that of the lens of a camera;⁶ any minor deviations from perceptual objectivity which the painting may seem to exhibit have generally been laid to the artist's notorious self-adulation.⁷ Yet The Meeting is a document neither of sheer narcissism nor of pure observation, although there is more than a measure of both in it; its composition is unequivocally based upon a source in popular imagery: a portion of a broadside of the Wandering Jew, representing the encounter of the Jew with two burghers of the town, which was later to serve as the frontispiece of Champfleury's Histoire de l'imagerie populaire (Figs. 2, 3).⁸ While the artist has completely transformed his schematic prototype, the implications arising from its use are of great significance, both in interpreting the work in question and in reexamining Courbet's artistic position as a whole during the crucial years of the “realist battle,” the decade of the 1850's.