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| Gustave Courbet The Wave 1865-69 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
Two years ago I was reading the memoirs of the art patron and philanthropist Louisine W. Havemeyer. That book, From Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, was published in 1930, the year after the author's death. Using this text, I put together a series of posts about Mrs. Havemeyer's prophetic taste, as well as her numerous blunders (abetted – until his early death – by her husband, an aggressive tycoon). Recently I discovered a biography of the pair, which Abrams published in 1986 as The Havemeyers, by Frances Weitzenhoffer. This author kindly but firmly dismissed Louisine's written memoirs – "as a writer she was self-conscious, expressing herself in a manner suitable to a Victorian lady . . . her writing is sentimental, even saccharine in tone . . . Louisine would not have accomplished all that she did had she been merely as sweet and uncomplicated as she portrayed herself." Weitzenhoffer based much of her account on the archive preserved by the Havemeyers' favorite dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922). She also expanded on Mrs. Havemeyer's pen-portrait of her greatest friend and chief artistic adviser, the American expatriate painter Mary Cassatt (1844-1926).
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) – as a ground-breaking modernist of the preceding generation – was Cassatt's idol. "Louisine had already heard of Courbet before she became aware of Degas, Monet or Pissarro, for she described in her Memoirs how Mary Cassatt, on their very first meeting at Madame del Sartre's, was unable to stay for tea because she was rushing off to Courbet's studio to see a newly completed canvas. 'She spoke of him as a painter of such great ability that I at once conceived a curiosity to see some of his pictures.' But Louisine did not see any of the artist's work until six years later, when she was in Paris in 1881 and a Courbet exhibition was held in the foyer of the Théâtre de la Gaîté. 'As usual, I owe it to Miss Cassatt that I was able to see the Courbets. She took me there, explained Courbet to me, spoke of the great painter in her flowing generous way, called my attention to his marvelous execution, to his color, above all to his realism, to that poignant, palpitating medium of truth through which he sought expression. I listened to her with such attention as we stood before his pictures that I never forgot it.'"
Mrs. Havemeyer subsequently built for herself one of the largest and best Courbet collections outside France (portions of it reproduced below).
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| Gustave Courbet Jo, La Belle Irlandaise 1865-66 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"The 'beautiful Irishwoman' depicted in this painting is Joanna Hiffernan (born 1842/43), mistress and model of the artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), and perhaps subsequently Courbet's lover. Although dated 1866, the picture was likely undertaken in 1865 when the two men painted together at the French seaside resort of Trouville. Courbet wrote of 'the superb beauty of a superb redhead whose portrait I have begun.' He would paint three repetitions with minor variations."
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| Gustave Courbet L'Amazone or Lady in a Riding Habit 1856 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"This painting of a horsewoman was long thought to represent the poet and novelist Louise Colet, muse of the writer Gustave Flaubert. However, the sitter has since been identified as Madame Clément Laurier. This work, made on the occasion of her marriage in 1856, forms a pair with Courbet's portrait of her husband (1855, Milwaukee Art Museum). The artist Mary Cassatt admired this picture as 'the finest woman's portrait Courbet ever did.'"
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| Gustave Courbet Charles Suisse or Monsieur Suisse 1861 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Suisse, a former artist's model, established an informal – and extremely liberal – art school in Paris which the young Courbet attended in the mid-1840s. By the time of this portrait, dated 1861, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro had also studied at the Académie Suisse. The sitter's spectacles and tousled gray hair indicate that he is getting on in age, but his gaze is sharp and animated; a fitting tribute to an early creative influence, painted the same year that Courbet opened a teaching studio of his own."
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| Gustave Courbet Still Life - Fruit 1871 oil on canvas Shelburne Museum, Vermont formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Gustave Courbet Hunting Dogs with Dead Hare 1857 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"This pictures dates to the same year that Courbet debuted his hunting scenes at the Paris Salon of 1857. It invites comparison to the slightly earlier The Quarry (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) which includes the same pair of hunting dogs, accompanied by a dead stag instead of a hare. The present work was apparently described by the German painter Otto Scholderer (1834-1902), whose studio was above the one Courbet rented in Frankfurt in the winter of 1858-59. Scholderer noted that Courbet painted the dogs and the landscape from memory but modelled the hare from life."
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| Gustave Courbet Madame de Brayer 1858 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Courbet made this portrait during an 1858 trip to Brussels intended to cultivate a Belgian market for his work. Shown that summer in Antwerp, the picture earned praise for its forthright portrayal of a woman who was not conventionally beautiful, but seemed 'strong-willed . . . and full of spirit.' The painting remained in the sitter's family until it was purchased in 1907, at the recommendation of Mary Cassatt, by Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer. Mrs. Havemeyer later recalled that Madame de Brayer was a Polish exile married to a Belgian."
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| Gustave Courbet Portrait of a Man ca. 1862 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Gustave Courbet The Deer ca. 1865 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"In the 1860s Courbet painted a series of snowscapes remarkable for their variegated paint handling and the contrast between ruddy browns and whites, which are often, as here, mixed with an icy blue. The deer that appears in a number of these works signify the remoteness of the settings, although man's presence is often suggested: the buck in this picture seems to look directly back at the viewer."
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| Gustave Courbet The Source of the Loue 1864 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
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| Gustave Courbet Madame Auguste Cuoq (Mathilde Desportes) ca. 1852-57 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Several artists ventured portraits of Mathilde Desportes, including the popular academician Jean-Jacques Henner (1829-19905), but her husband, Auguste Cuoq, found most of them unacceptable. This likeness was among those he rejected, reportedly because he felt that it did not adequately convey his wife's beauty. Courbet appears to have finished the picture to his own satisfaction in 1857, the date he assigned it in the catalogue of the solo exhibition he mounted in Paris in 1867."
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| Gustave Courbet Young Bather 1866 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"The traditional theme of women bathing attracted Courbet's attention repeatedly in the 1860s. This scene revisits a motif that excited a furor of controversy when the artist first broached it a decade earlier: a realistically fleshy nude enjoying herself at a woodland spring. But by the time the present work was exhibited, viewers were more accepting of Courbet's approach. One writer praised this 'beautiful girl' as 'health itself, with an ample and plump silhouette . . . one couldn't be more independent or more true.'"
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| Gustave Courbet The Source 1862 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"This nude is painted in an unflinchingly naturalistic style and is devoid of the trappings of academic allegory to which the painting's title alludes. Courbet is thought to have intended it as a response to Ingres's own La Source (1856, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which was exhibited at the Galerie Martinet, Paris, in 1861. The picture by Ingres depicts an idealized nude holding a jar from which water pours, an allusion to a spring or river source, and symbolizing poetic inspiration."
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| Gustave Courbet The Woman in the Waves 1868 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"Between 1864 and 1868 Courbet undertook a series of paintings of the female nude. He could not have failed to witness the triumph of Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) at the Salon of 1863, along with the popularity of similar representations by Cabanel's fellow academicians. Here, Courbet evokes the myth of Venus, the goddess born of the sea, but slyly subverts convention by depicting the model's underarm hair – an element of realism amplified by the almost palpable quality of her flesh."
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| Gustave Courbet Woman with Parrot 1866 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"When this painting was shown in the Salon of 1866, critics censured Courbet's 'lack of taste' as well as his model's 'ungainly' pose and 'disheveled hair'. Yet the provocative picture found favor with a younger generation of artist's who shared Courbet's disregard for academic standards. Manet began his version of the subject the same year; and Cézanne apparently carried a small photograph of the present work in his wallet."
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| Gustave Courbet Nude with Flowering Branch or Torso of a Woman 1863 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York formerly owned by Louisine Havemeyer |
"In their day the American collectors Louisine and H.O. Havemeyer amassed one of the largest and most representative private collections of Courbet's work. They acquired this painting, their first nude by Courbet, in early 1892, when their Tiffany-designed New York residence was nearing completion."
– curatorial notes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the institution to which Mrs. Havemeyer bequeathed the largest share of her collection)