Le Guitarrero

Gustave Courbet had his first Salon acceptance in 1844 with Portrait of the Artist (Courbet with a Black Dog), (Paris, Petit Palais), in which he is seated in his native landscape around Ornans with his proud new possession, a purebred English spaniel (fig. 1). In this first representation, the artist sought to establish himself as a member of the Parisian Bohemian circle. The success of this first endeavor encouraged further efforts to unite man with nature, and Le Guitarrero was Courbet’s second successful submission to the Salon and the only one of five entries by the artist to have been accepted in 1845.

Although the present work is called a self-portrait by Theophile Silvestre and was accepted as such by subsequent critics, Marie-Therèse Forges (op. cit., p. 30) rejected this identification and Helène Toussaint has argued that the sitter was actually the violinist Alphonse Promayet, Courbet’s boyhood friend who accompanied him to Paris (exh. cat., Paris, Grand Palais, loc. cit.). Toussaint has proposed that because of the identical dimensions of Le Guitarrero and Le Sculpteur, (fig. 2) and the latter was always considered the self-portrait, these two paintings were conceived as pendants demonstrating an avowal of the close friendship between the two sitters.

Using portraits of friends and family in ways that transcend portraiture is an important feature of Courbet’s best-known and most important paintings, from After Dinner at Ornans of 1850, The Meeting of 1854 and The Painter’s Studio of 1855. In After Dinner at Ornans, the first full statement of the artist’s maturity, the figure playing the violin for the audience of three men around the table is that of Promayet, who came from a musical family in Ornans and was at this time trying to make a career as a violinist in Paris. The friendship between the musician and the artist was based not only on a shared childhood experience, but also on their common devotion to a life dedicated to the arts. Such was Courbet’s deep respect for Promayet that he placed the violinist among the group of those occupying the right-hand side of the pictorial space in The Painter’s Studio (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, fig. 3). To Courbet, this is the group representing those to whom art is of primary significance and who supported Courbet’s own concept of the role of art. Using the robe-clad portrait of Promayet (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, fig. 4), the artist situated the figure among a group that included his patron Alfred Bruyas, the social philosopher Prudhon, and Courbet’s old friend, the poet Max Buchon. In the present work, Promayet is painted not in his own persona but in that of a figure with beautifully detailed costume accessories in the late medieval style and playing a contemporary guitar that gives the image a Spanish flavor that is also stressed in Courbet’s own title for the painting, Le Guitarrero.

Both Le Guitarrero and its companion piece show the influence at this formative period of the artist’s development of the Style Troubadour, an aspect of Romantic painting which combined the scale and precision of genre painting with subjects drawn from a Gothic past that could only be imagined in terms of costume and architectural and decorative detail. This essentially literary style was past its height by the time Courbet arrived in Paris in late 1839, but there were still paintings to be seen in the Salons, and even more imagery of this kind in popular illustration. It was a style that Courbet explored in a small group of works of around 1843-1845 as he was emerging from his earliest years of copying Old Masters, working from the live model and experimenting with his own compositions. It is interesting to note in this connection that even The Man Made Mad by Fear of 1844 (National Gallery, Oslo), representing such an extreme state of emotion, is depicted in the archaic costume of the Style Troubadour. Evidently, Courbet found something of use to his own contradictory nature in the curious combination of clear-cut technical realism and the fanciful subject matters of these images.