Gustave Courbet

Sale:  Hôtel Drouot, Esquisses Terminées des Tableaux de l'Exposition des Beaux-Arts, Paris, June 27, 1855, lot 19, as Courbet – Les Cribleuses de blé (probably consigned by Courbet)
Private Collection

Le Havre, Exposition Municipale, 1858, no. 127 (as Courbet – Jeune fille épilant du blé –esquisse des Cribleuses)
Possibly, London, The French Gallery, 1859, no. 40
Ornans, Musée Départemental Gustave Courbet, L'apologie de la nature...ou l'exemple de Courbet, June 2-October 21, 2007, p. 153, illustrated in color

Possibly, Francis Haskell, "L'art française et l'opinion anglaise dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle," Revue de l'art, 1975, no. 30, p. 76, note 48
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), exh. cat., Paris, Grand Palais, 1977, p. 135 and London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1978, p. 120

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting has not been restored for some time, if at all. It is painted onto a piece of board which has broken in numerous places in the past. All these breaks are visible in the following places: the upper left corner, upper center, upper center right side, lower right corner and in the lower right quadrant beneath the cupboard. Some amateurish repairs have been attempted here and there yet essentially there is no retouching to the picture. The paint layer itself however has most likely never been cleaned and is not abraded or stained in any way. This picture needs some kind of fairly significant reinforcement in places, if not on the entire reverse, to enable a restorer to accurately fill and retouches to the losses. If this is permitted, the picture can be restored very well and will feel very fresh as a result.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The exciting discovery of the esquisse for The Corn Sifters is certain to shed new light on Courbet's working methods.  It generally has been assumed that Courbet did not follow the traditional Academic sequence of working out the various stages of ideas that led to the final painting.  In other words, very few preparatory drawings exist and up until now, no final oil sketches have been identified that can be directly linked to his well-known compositions. In fact, it generally has been believed that he simply never did them.  The documented history of the present work may shed some light on explaining its existence, or at least it asks questions begging to be answered. 

Courbet painted The Corn Sifters (Les cribleuses de blé) (fig. 1) for the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle, where it appeared side-by-side with ten other works by the artist.  This was the same year that Courbet installed a separate exhibition of forty paintings in a near-by building, The Pavillion of Realism, built on the Avenue Montaigne.  Both exhibitions took place over the summer months of 1855.  During the time when the final version of The Corn Sifters was on view during the Exposition Universelle, a very interesting and, somewhat unique, auction occurred at Drouot in Paris on June 27, 1855.  It was titled, D'Esquisses Terminées de Tableaux de l'Exposition des Beaux-Arts. This sale was made up of 90 lots by 64 different artists; among the roster of names (many of which are unknown today) were Doré, Diaz de la Peña, Harpignies, Jongkind, Troyon, Toulmouche, Picou and under numbers 18 and 19 were two esquisses by Courbet, Les Casseurs de Pierre and Les Cribleuses de blé. The theme of this auction was to bring together the oil sketches that corresponded to the paintings on view at the Exposition Universelle.  There were landscapes, genre subjects, mythological, religious and history themes; in other words, the organizers of the sale appeared to have intentionally selected a variety of subjects represented in the 1855 Salon. The motivation for this auction and its selection of artists to be sold remains a mystery but the most important fact that has now emerged was that Courbet did indeed do oil sketches, but are these two works unique in his oeuvre and if so, why did he do them?  We can only speculate.  Was Courbet asked to submit two esquisses for this auction, which meant – even if this was not his normal practice – he now would have to paint them?  Or, did the organizers just assume that all of the Salon artists had esquisses of the final compositions in their studios and could simply open a cupboard door to find one for the auction, and if this was not the case with Courbet, did he initially agree to be included in the auction and then paint two esquisses "after" the originals. Certainly his documented interest in self promotion (and interest in selling his paintings) would support either possibility. 

The next record of an esquisse for The Corn Sifters appears in an exhibition in Le Havre in 1858 where it is listed under Courbet's name:  no. 127 – Jeune fille épilant du blé – esquisse des Cribleuses. While this 1858 show is cited in the catalogues of the 1977 Courbet retrospective (Paris, p. 135 and London, p. 120), at that time, the authors did not have any knowledge of the existence of a sketch.  And, Francis Haskell in a 1975 article devoted to the subject of English taste for French art (Haskell, p. 76) mentions that Courbet's Cribleuses de blé was included in an 1859 exhibition at the French Gallery in London. Haskell rightly understands that this reference refers to The Corn Sifters, or a variant of it.  Sarah Faunce believes that the French Gallery exhibition more probably included the esquisse and not the final version of the painting, as has previously been assumed.   Courbet is known to have loaned the large painting to Brussels in 1857 and to Besançon in 1860, which were two extensive and important shows. It is more likely, according to Faunce, that although we cannot document the results of the 1855 Drouot sale of Esquisses Terminées, that the esquisse passed into private hands and subsequently was shown in Le Havre in 1858 and at the French Gallery in London in 1859.

Our esquisse is painted on cardboard, which is an unusual support for Courbet to have used.  However, Bruno Mottin, in his essay in the catalogue for the recent Courbet retrospective comments that out of all of the Courbets he evaluated in French collections, only one is on cardboard:  The Portrait of Madame Andler in Morlaix (RF 168) (Bruno Mottin, " A Complex Genesis:  Courbet in the Laboratory," Gustave Courbet, exh. cat., Paris and New York, 2007, p.  71). Interestingly, Madame Andler dates to 1855, the year of the esquisse,  and the dimensions are almost the same.

In a letter to Champfleury in late 1854, Courbet refers to The Corn Sifters as a "painting of country life...It belongs to a series of The Young Ladies from the Village, also a strange painting." (Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, ed., Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, p. 133, letter 54-8).  The setting for The Corn Sifters is a bluterie, or bolting room in Ornans.  It has previously been assumed that Courbet's two sisters, Zoé and Juliette, and his illegitimate son, Désiré Binet posed for the picture (Gustave Courbet, exh. cat. 1977, p. 134). When compared to the final version of The Corn Sifters (fig. 1), the esquisse conveys all of the characteristics associated with the development of what might be called the last step leading to the finished product.  In the esquisse, Courbet has decided upon the composition and placement of the figures.  Color choices have also been determined.  What Courbet still has yet to refine in the finished oil are the specific gestures and attitudes of his sitters. The most noticeable differences are in the figures flanking the woman sifting.  While they both appear in each painting, Courbet has refined their expressions and actions in the final work; the seated woman falls asleep in the Nantes painting, and the young boy becomes much more inquisitive as he peeks into a tarare, or device for cleaning grain. What remains the same are such tiny details as the delicacy with which the seated woman picks up one kernel of grain with her fingers; this subtle gesture is expressed identically in the esquisse.  But most remarkable of all is that the monumentality and strength of the woman sifting is as powerful in the small esquisse as it is in the finished oil: knees pressed to the floor, strong, exaggerated outstretched arms sifting the grain, and one straight line from her left hand to her neck revealing no profile or facial features but still perfectly defining her expression.

The 1855 sale at Drouot also included an esquisse for Les Casseurs de Pierre (The Stonebreakers). Based on the spontaneity and implicit monumentality of the esquisse for The Corn Sifters, we can only imagine what the equivalent for The Stone Breakers must have looked like.