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Lot Essay
In September 1871 Courbet was sentenced to three months imprisonment for his role in the destruction of the Vendme column during the Commune in May of that year. Interned in St Plagie prison, he was granted a licence to paint at the beginning of November and, most likely inspired by the contingencies of his situation, for the first time in his career he turned to painting still lifes of the fruit brought to him by his visitors.
Pommes at poires, with its brooding interior lighting and splashes of crimson, shares the tenebriste mood of Courbet's celebrated Pommes et grenade dans une coupe (National Gallery, London; Fernier 764), also executed during the autumn of his imprisonment. Indeed, such was the chord that this new genre struck with Courbet, that of the approximately twenty still lifes executed around this time, some inscribed 'Ste Plagie' can in fact be dated to the period immediately following his release from prison when he became a patient at a hospital in Neuilly. These slightly later pictures, mostly painted at the beginning of 1872 - such as Pommes (Bayerische Staatsgemldessammlungen, Munich; F. 771) - tend to show a more spacious setting, but are nevertheless charged with the same intimate impulse as the prison pictures.
The present work was formerly in the collection of the German artist Max Liebermann. As the only work by Courbet in his collection, Pommes can be seen to meet Liebermann's definition of the essence of the artist's craft. 'Als jemand Courbet fragte, wie er so oft einen Apfel oder eine Birne malen knne, antwortete er: Weil ich dazu angeregt war. Nicht das Was, auch nicht das Wie, den Begriff der lebendigen Natur zu gestalten, macht den Knstler' (M. Liebermann, "ber Kunst", in Die Phantasie in der Malerei, Frankfurt, 1978, p. 37).
Pommes at poires, with its brooding interior lighting and splashes of crimson, shares the tenebriste mood of Courbet's celebrated Pommes et grenade dans une coupe (National Gallery, London; Fernier 764), also executed during the autumn of his imprisonment. Indeed, such was the chord that this new genre struck with Courbet, that of the approximately twenty still lifes executed around this time, some inscribed 'Ste Plagie' can in fact be dated to the period immediately following his release from prison when he became a patient at a hospital in Neuilly. These slightly later pictures, mostly painted at the beginning of 1872 - such as Pommes (Bayerische Staatsgemldessammlungen, Munich; F. 771) - tend to show a more spacious setting, but are nevertheless charged with the same intimate impulse as the prison pictures.
The present work was formerly in the collection of the German artist Max Liebermann. As the only work by Courbet in his collection, Pommes can be seen to meet Liebermann's definition of the essence of the artist's craft. 'Als jemand Courbet fragte, wie er so oft einen Apfel oder eine Birne malen knne, antwortete er: Weil ich dazu angeregt war. Nicht das Was, auch nicht das Wie, den Begriff der lebendigen Natur zu gestalten, macht den Knstler' (M. Liebermann, "ber Kunst", in Die Phantasie in der Malerei, Frankfurt, 1978, p. 37).