We invite you to a conversation about Gustave Courbet and his bold experiments in landscape painting.

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet’s Landscapes explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism. The Courbet Paul Galvez discovers is not the celebrated history painter of provincial life, but a committed landscapist whose view of nature aligns him with contemporary developments in geology, history, linguistics, and literature. The author is joined by fellow art historian Ewa Lajer-Burcharth.

Paul Galvez is research associate at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, University of Texas. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard. She is the author of Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror; Chardin Material;  and The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard.

Paul Galvez & Ewa Lajer-Burcharth Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting