“Landscape with a Dead Horse” - a painting by Gustave Courbet from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum .
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| Gustave Courbet | ||
| "Landscape with a dead horse . " OK. 1855-1860 | ||
| Canvas, oil. 45 × 56 cm | ||
| State Hermitage Museum , St. Petersburg | ||
| ( inv. GE-3897 ) | ||
The picture shows a forest road, in the middle of which lies a bloodied corpse of a white horse and the figure of a runaway man with a bag in his hands is visible from the back. At the bottom left is the artist's signature: G. Courbet .
The painting is considered one of the most mysterious in the work of Courbet: it is absolutely unclear what happened - an accident or a crime, why a person with a burden runs away, why the corpse of a horse is in the blood and in general because of which it died.
The art critic V.N. Berezina noted that Courbet in this picture tried to "contrast the unvarnished, even crude reality, to idealism and the falsity of salon-academic art." She also connects the poem by Charles Baudelaire from the collection “ Flowers of Evil ” with the picture of his friend Courbet:
Although the poem “Carrion” placed there is not directly related to the content of the Hermitage painting, the closeness of these works is evident, manifested in the veracity and fearlessness with which the poet and painter show aesthetically unattractive sides of life [1] .
The main researcher of the Department of Western European Fine Arts of the State Hermitage, Doctor of Art History A. G. Kostenevich, in his essay on French art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, was rather skeptical:
Mysteriously the whole mood of the picture. The thicket is written widely, fluently. However, the Hermitage canvas is far from the best works of the artist. Little can be said about the coloristic merits of the picture: the use of bitumen made it excessively dark [2] .
The painting was painted in the second half of the 1850s and was almost immediately bought by Count N. A. Kushelev-Bezborodko . After the owner’s death, the painting, like all the works from the Kushelev-Bezborodko collection, was transferred to the Museum of the Academy of Arts by will and became part of the special Kushelev gallery; in the 1868 gallery catalog it was listed as “Study of the Forest. In the hollow is a dead horse ” [3] ; in 1922 it was transferred to the State Hermitage Museum [4] .
Notes
- ↑ Berezina V. French painting of the first half and middle of the XIX century in the Hermitage. Scientific catalog. - L .: Art, 1983 .-- S. 164-165.
- ↑ Kostenevich A.G. French art of the 19th - early 20th centuries in the Hermitage. Essay guide. L .: Art, 1984. - S. 66.
- ↑ Berezina V. French painting of the first half and middle of the XIX century in the Hermitage. Scientific catalog. - L .: Art, 1983 .-- S. 245.
- ↑ State Hermitage Museum. - Courbet, Gustave. "Landscape with a dead horse."