The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (119 page)

(1782–1842).
English landscape painter (mainly in water-colour) and etcher. Son of a well-to-do Norwich merchant, he went to London in 1798 and worked for Dr
Monro
. In 1800, 1801, and 1802 he travelled in Wales, moving in the circle of artists around Sir George
Beaumont
, where he met
Girtin
. From 1803 to 1805 he made tours in Yorkshire, where he painted some of his finest work. In 1806 he settled in Norwich, where, together with
Crome
, he became the most important representative of the
Norwich School
. He made several trips to France, and in 1834 he was appointed Professor of Drawing at King's College, London. Throughout his life he was subject to periods of melancholia and despondency. Cotman's early watercolours, such as the celebrated
Greta Bridge
(BM, London,
c.
1805, a later version, 1810, is in the Castle Museum, Norwich), include some of the greatest examples of the classic English watercolour technique, showing remarkable boldness and sureness of hand. He used large flat
washes
to build up form in clearly defined planes and shapes of almost geometrical simplicity. In his later years, however, he tried to catch the public fancy by large and gaudily melodramatic watercolours, in which he used an
impasto
obtained with rice-paste. Cotman also illustrated various books with his etchings, mainly works on architectural antiquities.

 
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Counihan , Noel
.

See
ANGRY PENGUINS
.

 
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(1819–77).
French painter, born at Ornans, the son of a prosperous farmer. He was a man of independent character and obstinate self-assurance, and claimed to be self-taught. In fact he studied with various minor masters in Ornans, Besançon and in Paris, where he moved in 1839, but he avoided academic instruction and learnt much from copying the work of 17th-cent.
naturalists
such as
Caravaggio
and
Velázquez
. His earliest pictures (including several narcissistic self-portraits) were in the
Romantic
tradition, but with three large canvases exhibited at the
Salon
of 1850 he established himself as the leader of the
Realist
school of painting: these are
The Burial at Ornans
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris),
The Peasants at Flagey
(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon), and
The Stone Breakers
(formerly in Dresden, but destroyed in the Second World War). The huge burial scene in particular made an enormous impact; it was attacked in some quarters for its alleged crudity and deliberate ugliness, but also hailed for its powerful naturalism. Never before had a scene from everyday life been presented in such an epic manner and Courbet was cast in the role of a revolutionary socialist. He gladly accepted this role (although it is unlikely that he painted the picture with political intention) and he became a friend and follower of the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon , collaborating on his book
On Art and its Social Significance
(1863). Courbet's boldness and self-confidence are as evident in his technique as in his choice of subjects. He often used a palette knife to apply paint and his work shows an unprecedented relish for the physical substance of his materials.
His unconventionality and hatred of authority was expressed most forcefully in 1855, when, dissatisfied with the representation allotted to him at the Paris Universal Exhibition, he organized a pavilion for his own work, calling it ‘Le Réalisme’. Included in the works he showed here was his most celebrated work,
The Painter's Studio
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1854–5). This huge (6-m. wide) canvas was subtitled by Courbet ‘a real allegory [a seeming contradiction in terms] summing up seven years in my artistic life’. He wrote a long (but not very clear) account of it, describing it as ‘the moral and physical history of my studio’ and saying it showed ‘all the people who serve my cause, sustain me in my ideal and support my activity’. In it he presents himself as the artist-hero, and in taking as his subject the activity of creating art he sounded a note that reverberated into the 20th cent. Interpretations of the picture have been many and varied, and it has recently been shown that it has covert but carefully thought out political content, attacking Napoleon III. After 1855 his work became less doctrinaire. His colours were less sombre and he often chose more obviously attractive subjects—landscapes from the Forest of Fontainebleau, the Jura, or the Mediterranean, seascapes with distant vistas, or comely and sensual nudes. After the deposition of Napoleon III, Courbet was active in the Paris Commune of 1871 and was appointed head of the arts commission. When the Commune fell he was imprisoned for his role in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, and he fled to Switzerland in 1873, being unable to pay the fine imposed on him (see
MEISSONIER
). He stayed there for the remaining four years of his life, painting mainly landscapes and portraits. Courbet did not form a school, but he had an enormous influence on 19th-cent. art because of his resounding rejection of the doctrine of idealization and concentration on the tangible reality of things. ‘Painting’, he said, ‘is an art of sight and should therefore concern itself with things seen; it should, therefore, abandon both the historical scenes of the
classical
school and poetic subjects from
Goethe
and Shakespeare favoured by the Romantic school.’ When asked to include angels in a painting for a church he replied: ‘I have never seen angels. Show me an angel and I will paint one.’

 
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(1876–1947).
British industrialist and art collector. A wealthy director of the family silk firm, he was a pioneer in Britain in the appreciation of French
Impressionist
and
Post-Impressionist
painters. In 1923 he gave to the
Tate Gallery
£50,000 for the purchase of works by French 19th-cent. painters, who were hardly represented in the gallery. Most of his own superb collection was presented to the University of London in 1932, a year after he had endowed the Courtauld Institute of Art, the first specialist centre in Britain for the study of art history. The co-founders of the Institute were Lord Lee of Fareham (1868–1947), a soldier and politician, who in 1921 had presented his country house—Chequers—to the nation to be the prime minister's country residence, and Sir Robert Witt (1872–1952), a lawyer who formed a library of reproductions of paintings and drawings that is now one of the cornerstones of the Institute's pre-eminence in art-historical studies. Both men left collections to the Courtauld Institute—Lee mainly of paintings, Witt of drawings and watercolours—and there have been several other important bequests, including that of the painter and critic Roger
Fry
. The most recent of the major bequests, that of the Anglo-Austrian art historian Count Antoine Seilern (1901–78) in 1978, has raised an already outstanding collection to new heights. Seilern's bequest is varied, reflecting his own scholarly interests, but its chief glory is its superlative group of works by
Rubens
. The Courtauld Institute was originally located in Courtauld's former house (a fine Robert Adam building) at 20 Portman Square, while the galleries occupied a building about a mile away next to the
Warburg
Institute in Woburn Square. In 1989–90, however, all the Institute's activities and collections were brought together under one roof at Somerset House in the Strand, fulfilling Samuel Courtauld's intention that students should work in intimate contact with original works of art.

 
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