NEW ACQUISITION: BOSTON'S COURBET

FEW painters managed to outrage the respectable standards of their day with more gusto than France's master of 19th century realism, Gustave Courbet. In his time he kept up a running battle with critics, who found his work sordid and common, termed him a "butcher" and "a great stupid painter." Today Courbet's work is attacked from the new academy of abstraction as too photographic.

Courbet's crime lay in giving monumental treatment to everyday subjects and drawing some of his deepest inspiration from direct contact with nature. Among his favorite areas were the forests near his native Ornans. It was probably there that in the 1860s he painted Forest Pool (see opposite), recently acquired by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, in which he set down a summer's instant that in breathless hush remains a delight to hunter and nature lover alike.

Scoffing at the idealized classic and romantic ideals in vogue, Courbet took his cue from reality as he saw it. "Angels! Madonnas! Who has seen them?" he once shouted, adding, "The first time one comes in here, don't forget to let me know." To young art students Courbet declared: "Art exists only in the representation of objects, visible and tangible to the artist . . . There can be no schools; there are only painters."

What caused Courbet as much trouble as his subject matter (a village funeral, peasant stone breakers, farm women winnowing wheat) was his own self-centered swagger and robust peasant's appetite. One of his favorite painting subjects was himself (see cut). He accepted an admirer's praise by assenting with gusto, "I paint like le bon Dieu." A sturdy, black-bearded bohemian, Courbet would sit up drinking until dawn, once on a trip to Munich defeated 60 Bavarians in a four-day drinking bout. His taste in female models (many of whom became his mistresses) was equally gargantuan.

Freethinker Courbet, once praised by Socialist Philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon as "the first true socialist painter," plunged into the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, was elected president of the short-lived Federal Commission of Artists. Later, when the conservatives returned to power, they accused Courbet (unjustly) of destroying Napoleon I's bronze column in Place Vendome. Imprisoned, Courbet later went into exile in Switzerland, after the French government had sent him a bill for restoring the column and confiscated his property. Plagued by money worries and by waning powers, he stepped up his daily wine ration to ten quarts, rapidly went into a decline, died of dropsy at the age of 58.

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