Gustave Courbet died in Swiss exile in December 1877, one day before the first installment was due on a bill of more than 323,000 francs to rebuild the Vendome Column. This episode traces how a painter born in rural Ornans in 1819, grandson of a French Revolution fighter, rejected the academy, taught himself at the Louvre, and after seeing Rembrandt and Frans Hals in the Netherlands decided that the only valid art was the unvarnished reality of his own era.

We explore The Stone Breakers, painted with a palette knife in thick impasto and destroyed in the 1945 bombing of Dresden, and A Burial at Ornans, a 22-foot canvas that gave life-size peasants the scale reserved for kings. When the 1855 Exposition Universelle rejected him, Courbet built his own Pavilion of Realism next door and published a manifesto. The same defiance carried him into th ...