Let's first begins with who Jean Desire Gustave Courbet was. Gustave Courbet was a famous French painter. Courbet was born in Ornans, France on June 10th of 1819. Ornans, France is a filled with forests and pasture's perfect for realist paintings. At the age of 14 Courbet was already in art training receiving lessons from Pere Baud a former student of a neo-classical painter named Baron Gros. Courbet's parents hoped he would go off and study law when he moved out in 1837. To there misfortune he had enrolled in at the art academy. At the art academy Courbet received lessons from Flajoulot another famous neo-classicist. At twenty years old Gustave Courbet went to Paris, the European center for art, political, and radical activists. It was about this time Courbet had started to study in the studio of the obscure painter M. Steuben.
Courbet's art was considered realism. Realism in art is basically taking every day acts and people and putting it on the canvas (ie: paint, drawing). This was Courbet's specialty. Gustave Courbet has painted many painting. A few of his most famous was "Wounded Man" which he painted in 1847, and was heavily rejected by the salon. A few of his other famous paintings was "After Dinner at Ornans", "Funeral at Ornans", and "Stonebreakers". This is only a few of his many famous paintings. Between 1841 and 1847 only three of the twenty-five pieces he submitted were approved and passed by the selection committee of the salon. The first ten years he was out on his own he sold almost no painting and made almost no money, thus he relied on his family to send him money to help support him with his artwork. Somewhere in this time period Gustave Courbet met a young lady named Virginia Binet whom little is known about except that she was his mistress and bore him a son in 1847.
When 1848 rolled around a Dutch art dealer viewed one of Gustave's pieces and invited him to Holland to make a deal. It was about this time