Gustave Courbet was a French artist and founder of the Realist movement in 19th-century France. His unidealized depictions of everyday life often provoked controversy, especially his The Stone Breakers (1850), a scene of manual laborers, and The Origin of the World (1866), a closely cropped rendering of a woman’s genitals. “The expression of beauty is in direct ratio to the power of conception the artist has acquired,” he once remarked. Born on June 10, 1819 in Ornans, France, he began taking lessons with a local artist at the age of 14. In 1839, he moved to Paris to study the works of Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens at the Louvre, and after long years of study he exhibited works at the 1848 Paris Salon. A popular and celebrated artist during his lifetime, he pushed the boundaries and influenced the work of Édouard Manet, the Impressionists, and Paul Cézanne. An active member of the left-wing Paris Commune of 1871, Courbet was imprisoned after a new government other threw the short-lived commune. Blamed for the destruction of the Place Vendôme Column during skirmishes in 1871, he was billed 300,000 francs by the new government. Unable able to pay, he fled to La Tour-de-Pails, Switzerland, where he lived until his death on December 31, 1877. Today, the artist’s paintings are held in the collections of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, among others.