The French debate about Gustave Courbet’s pictorial realism and the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century

In 1855, Gustave Courbet’s “Pavillon du réalisme” excited indignation. A close scrutiny of the reactions of four prominent critics of the time – Théophile Silvestre, Charles Baudelaire, and the Goncourt brothers – sheds new light on the nature of the debate and the underlying aesthetic theories behind these divided responses. All of them participated in defining the painter of Ornans as the spearhead of a new current in painting that negated the imagination, as they claimed. Analyzing their arguments leads me to retrace the lexical misunderstanding at the heart of the debate about French realism, marked by unsteady definitions and violent partisanship. According to Baudelaire and Silvestre, realism is flawed in its very definition. For the Goncourt brothers, realism, if based on Courbet’s pictorial model, is a burden for the new literary style they wished to promote. The French debate of the 1850/1860s about Courbet’s pictorial realism illustrates the dialogue between literature and art in the mid-nineteenth century and the problems involved in operating with partisan concepts of the time, such as ‘romanticism’ and ‘realism.’