Heart of darkness
Alexander Adams | The Critic | 24th April 2026
After winning a Salon prize in 1849 Courbet set about disrupting the art establishment. That meant painting the realities of everyday life, being respectful of the labouring classes and painting erotica. It gave him a reputation as “a bucolic thug from the [provinces] trampling all over the classical tradition”. We still care about him because, across his wide-ranging work, he blazed the path away from Romanticism toward what, just a few decades later, became modern art.