Courbet's Desperate is Back

One of France’s Favorite Paintings Comes Home

See It For the First Time in 20 Years

Paris is welcoming back one of French art’s most famous pieces: Le Désespéré (1845) by Gustave Courbet.

Why has the French press offered so much fanfare on the subject?

Courbet’s disquieting self-portrait remains one of the most striking images of the 19th (or any) century. But even more importantly, it is privately owned, rarely making a public appearance. In fact, it hasn’t been seen in France in over 20 years.

Now, that’s all changed.

Beginning on October 14, the Musée d'Orsay is showing Le Désespéré for up to five years—all thanks to a loan from the Qatar Museums Authority.

Let’s celebrate this fantastic news with a brief look at the painting making so many headlines. Then, we’ll dive into the best way to check it out: with our private tour of the Orsay museum!

What makes Le Désespéré such a special painting?

The Painter

To understand the importance of the painting, it helps to begin by understanding the painter’s place in art history.

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) was a major French artist at a time when the country gave birth to a tremendous number of transcendent talents. It was a time of unbelievable formal achievement and aesthetic experimentation.

During this era, the Académie des Beaux-Arts produced some of its greatest masters, including William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, to name only a few. These artists were entirely committed to an older, inherited way of painting that was strictly legislated by the Academy.

But this was also a time of great upheaval. Modernist visionaries like Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Paul Gauguin revolutionized how a painting might communicate with the viewer.

While so-called Academic art and Impressionism waged war, there was an earlier innovative movement that laid the groundwork for such an epic clash of worldviews. That movement was Realism. The revolutionary leading its charge? Gustave Courbet.

So, what made Realism so transformational?

The long-reigning Academic style certainly strove for realistic-looking paintings—works that have a high level of what we call verisimilitude. But Realism as a movement went beyond simply “looking real.” It spoke to what was real in the contemporary world.

See our tour : Painting Evolution on a Louvre / Orsay Combo 4H-tour

See, the Academy ranked paintings based on subject matter, preferring historical, mythological, and Biblical scenes to, say, still life. But they never even thought to commit a canvas and paint to the social reality of France in their day.

How exactly did this new idea of Realism work? Consider Courbet’s A Burial At Ornans (1850), which you can see in the permanent collection in the Orsay on the same trip to see Le Désespéré. In the painting, we don’t see the burial of a great king or a story from classical mythology. Instead, it depicts the burial of the artist’s grand uncle. The models he used were the very same villagers who attended the actual burial.

Courbet brought the full weight of his training and mastery to show an event that the French people of his time could directly relate to. His painting showed them their own lives. It ennobled their experience and showcased them in the vaunted halls of the Paris Salon!

As you might imagine, this caused quite a stir.

It not only turned the page of the Academy’s ranking of genres. Courbet’s new movement also pushed off the elevated, almost hyperventilated emotions of Romanticism, which had dominated French painting in the first half of the 19th century. The Romantics amped up the dramatic register of their images to near supernatural levels, capturing moments of the sublime.

But Courbet sought to paint scenes that were far more familiar and subtle.

Turning His Powers on Himself

Years before he scandalized the art world and put Romanticism on notice, Courbet busied himself with portraits. He painted many portraits of his friends and himself, honing his skills.

We might then wonder why we need a history of what would happen after he painted his famous self-portrait to understand it.

Well, in Le Désespéré, we see one of the 19th century’s most vibrant voices finding himself. And because it is a self-portrait, the painting gives us a glimpse into the intensity and gloom that are so characteristic of the young artist.

It also shows us the emergence of his Realism before it was ready to fully take shape. We can feel, in the emotive power of the painting, Romanticism’s influence on the painter’s early years. But we can also sense how he is taking the grandiosity of that movement and tying it to psychological reality. While the self-portrait shows Courbet in crisis, it’s a crisis that seems disturbingly relatable to our own darkest moments.

It’s this mixture of intensity and relatability that has made Le Désespéré such an iconic painting. You can see it still being used for book covers and YouTube thumbnails to convey intense desperation and even madness.

How to See Le Désespéré

Book a private tour of the Musée d’Orsay for a deep dive into this stunning collection of 19th and early 20th century French painting—and now (for the first time in 20 years) that includes Le Désespéré.

This is the single best way to connect to the revolutionary spirit that made Courbet one of France’s boldest painters. You can also get a taste for the Academic artwork that Realism was reacting to—in particular, 12 of the most mesmerizing Bouguereau paintings, like Dante and Virgil in Hell (1850) and The Birth of Venus (1879). Then, you can see the modernist innovations that exploded onto the scene thanks to Courbet—you can’t miss Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863) and a head-spinning 86 paintings by Monet.

Your guide will take you through the exciting path of French art from 1848 to 1914, years that changed what it meant to be an artist. And now, that story will include a painting the French public hasn’t seen in 20 years: Le Désespéré!

Orsay Tour

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